It does matter. We get you love xTeve and it works.
But I have a legal subscription to a service that gives me Tv anywhere access and i’d like to be able to use that, I’d never have to worry about my IPTV provider being shut down or being randomly unstable.
It most certainly does not “work fine with Plex”. I’ve tried multiple times to get xTeVe and Plex to play nicely together and every time, regardless of the articles or help guides or troubleshooting information I try, stops working within hours of starting it with the same problem stopping with “The Live Stream has ended” before the playback even starts.
It’s a shame because Plex really IS an outstanding solution for recording liveTV, especially with commercial detection and removal.
As far as legalities go… I’m not a lawyer but every legal decision I’ve seen on the topic says viewing streams isn’t illegal… only being the ‘unofficial broadcaster’ of said stream is.
I’ll follow up on ChannelsDVR - I’ve tried the nearest Plex ‘competitor’ and the ironic part there is that it’s reasonably great at IP TV recording… but not nearly as good as a home media/movie server.
xTeVe works flawless over here. Perhaps your provider is crappy or you’re using a Plex client that needs work. IN-FACT unless you have the stream buffer enabled in xTeVe (don’t enable it) the only thing it’s doing is passing a URL to Plex. That’s it. So unless the stream buffer is enabled it literally isn’t effecting ANYTHING to do with your problem streams.
In fact I rather Plex not implement IPTV directly into the app and leave it as-is because I can set it up much better with the 3rd party tools than trying to rely on them having to fix more stuff that doesn’t work correctly.
Try using TVheadend as your backend. TVheadend → xTeVe → Plex. Works flawless. Not only is this the best way but it’s trivial to add other streaming apps to the setup like Kodi/VLC/Emby/Jellyfin whathaveyou. Seamless integration with EVERYTHING.
So let me make sure I have you straight on this.
I use my IPTV services (plural, two different ones) with ANY IPTV app and they work fine.
I use my IPTV services with Emby configured for IPTV and they work fine.
I use xTeVe with Plex and configure for LiveTV and THAT poops the bed.
But… the problem is my IPTV service…
Do I have that right?
Look… go with God if xTeVe is working for you… happy to hear it… but for me? Not working so well… and from what I read on the xTeVe issues github page I’m not the only one.
Let me repeat myself so YOU understand. All xTeVe does is pass a URL to Plex and then PLEX handles the streaming from the provider. Not xTeVe. Therefore the issue is Plex. Let me iterate further.
The problem with the stream dying after a random amount of time is that FFmpeg SUCKS on reconnecting to IPTV streams. Plex uses FFmpeg.
The precise issue is that an IPTV provider most likely uses a load balancer which forwards your request to a random streaming server. When this happens the forward URL includes an AUTHORIZATION CODE to allow you to stream. When FFmpeg disconnects on stream errors and subsequently tries to reconnect it will use the forwarded URL that included the OLD authorization code instead of the main streaming URL. FFmpeg thinks the forward URL is the correct URL to reconnect to when in fact it should be trying the main URL instead. When gitches/disconnects happen the authorization code EXPIRES and is NO LONGER VALID. If FFmpeg instead tried ON RECONNECT the original URL the providers load balancer would forward FFmpeg a new URL with a valid authorization code. Then the stream would resume no problem.
Like I said, use TVheadend as the backend. You’ll be happy. This is what I use and my streams NEVER die. TVheadend also has functionality where you can program more than one streaming URL per channel so if one source is down it will try another in a round robin fashion. Good for when your provider has multiple sources for the same channel.
TVheadend has a learning curve to it and is not very straight forward but once you get it set up I will answer your questions.
This is very insightful… Thank you. I also found a fork of xTeVe that is still seeing active development, and started running that under TMUX in my qnap server… that seemed to help with the streams suddenly no longer being available since it now loops back to the same server that Plex is running on. However, it isn’t fullproof…
I’ll check out TVheadend too. I just have to find a working qnap build for a recent version. You wouldn’t happen to know of one by any chance?
Thank you for the information about FFMPEG… this I did not know about.
So where does tvheadend sit in the scheme of things? I like the idea of mapping alternate streams to a single channel. Does tvheadend run on Windows or is it just for the *nix platforms?
TVheadend is in the front and controls everything. It runs on Linux/FreeBSD. If you have access to Docker then it gets real easy to set up.
I have access to docker on my QNAP… can you point me to a Docker Compose file that would work?
Not sure how a fork of the app is going to help with Plex erroring out… unless you’re using xTeVe as a stream buffer all it does is pass a URL to Plex - literally that’s it.
If you are using it as a stream buffer I recommend not and switching to TVh.
Totally get it… Oddly enough… just doing pass of the URL failed…but passthrough streaming via this build of xTeVe that I’m using is working fine so far… I don’t even know why… 
That would be a small sacrifice to come up with a more stable solution…
Are your streams .m3u8 or .m3u? .m3u8 is not compatabile with Plex and would then need the xTeVe stream buffer.
Thank you… much appreciated.
If and when you get comfortable with TVh and like it and want to keep it I have a version I modified with custom tweaks/features. Like streamlink integration and random service selection for a channel. This means if you have multiple sources for the same channel TVh will select a stream at random instead of a predetermined order it does out of the box.
tvheadend.org has loads of information to sift through.
Now you tell me you have all kinds of additional goodies? Should have said that sooner! 
Lemme spin this up on my NAS and see what happens…
They are m3u.
You can do some really cool stuff with streamlink integration like pulling streams off websites etc. Like Twitch or Youtube etc… theres a lot of site plugins for streamlink… and some plugins for certain specific sites that arent included normally.
Nice… I’ll dig in… thanks again…! Personally I think overall Plex is superior to Emby in overall ease of use… etc… so being able to keep everything in Plex would def make my life way more convenient…
When adding your IPTV Automatic Network make sure you set the “Service ID” to 1 and unselect “Scan After Creation” otherwise it will try to scan every Mux. It’s not needed for IPTV and will tie up all your connections or possibly flood your provider.
I am having some difficulty getting EPG grabbers to be available in the Docker image. There’s no options to configure any within TVH at all (i.e. no EPG Grabber Modules tab in the Channels/EPG section). I’m presuming there’s something that has to be configured on startup or that it’s my error.
Suggestions or pointers? Thanks.
