Comment by thundergolfer 2 days ago
One of those projects that has me wondering what I was doing instead of building this. The end result is great, and the technical details seem like they'd be interesting. TIL about Internet Protocol TV: https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv
I've not looked at it in a few months but fairly sure its not pirated, its just online streams of FTA channels. All the UK ones for example are are just the UK's free to air broadcasters and someones figured out the urls to the feeds they use on their websites and apps.
Lots of the US and CA ones look to be the same sort of situation. You'll find most wont work without a VPN as they are geo blocked.
Free to air in UK does not mean free to the whole world. For example BBC/Channel 4/Channel 5 are geofenced to UK only.
I have a friend who purchased some sketchy IPTV service for $100/year. Basically all the cable and premium channels from around the world. Navigating the channels are difficult as there are many duplicates or all the local channels around the country. Interesting to watch the news in different areas and sometimes a little unreliable and probably illegal but it was a TIL for me too.
I had something similar a few years ago. I ended up having to write a little script to pull out just the channels I wanted as nothing could handle the 18 thousand stream options it provided (total insanity that its bundled up into 1 file like that in the first place but seems to be the norm for dodgy IPTV providers).
Nowadays theres better tools for the job. StreamMaster* for example can handle thousands of IPTV sources and let you organise them nicely into something that can be read by Plex, Jellyfin, etc.
*Sadly recently abandoned but still available on github.
What you see in that repo is not truly true IPTV[0].
What you see in the repo is a lot of different HLS manifest[1], which in turn pointed to different questionable sources of all the OTT streams around the world.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_IPTV_Forum [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming