Open-TV: Ultra-fast, simple and powerful cross-platform IPTV app | Hacker News Reader

Open-TV: Ultra-fast, simple and powerful cross-platform IPTV app

github.com

155 pointsthunderbong34 comments

Hey guys, I'm the dev of Open TV. Someone from here sent me an email so I just made an account to give a bit more context about my project.

Open TV is a search-based IPTV player designed for desktop use. It puts to the fire many of the sins of UI/UX design of traditional IPTV apps to prioritize simplicity and speed. Many classic IPTV features like the EPG are absent on purpose just to keep that commitment.

I've been developing Open TV solo for the past 2 years. It used to be a very basic electron app that I made for my relatives so they would stop using proprietary, slow and almost malware-tier IPTV apps.

I shared it with others as a "it's useful for me, maybe also for you". I had absolutely no intention of making it bigger than a stupid simple m3u viewer (it didn't even have xtream support before, or even categories). But I received so much positive feedback from users that I decided to give it some more love. It's been on and off, and at some point I reached 0.9.8 and pretty much called it quits for a while. I wasn't paid to work on Open TV so it was very difficult to allocate even more time.

I decided to revisit the project 4 months ago. Over the past 3-4 months, I've completely rewritten the app in Rust/Tauri so that I could finally add features requested by the community and to be able to publish it on Flathub/Microsoft Store.

One of the very first feature request of this project was to put it on flathub and I'm really proud to finally deliver on that. I'm a Debian user, so it feels like I'm finally giving back to the open source community by making it my app so widely accessible on Linux.

If you like Open TV and its dedication to be simple, fast and bloat-free, please consider donating. I'm still solo on this and doing it purely for the sake of my users (I don't really watch TV...), so any contribution is really appreciated.

>It used to be a very basic electron app that I made for my relatives so they would stop using proprietary, slow and almost malware-tier IPTV apps.

Those tend to be some of the best projects! <3

it works well, but some of the user experience is as bad as every streaming service for me.

i browse categories, have to click 'load more' a ton of times to see everything, and if i dare enter a category, and then go back to category list, all the times i clicked 'load more' is undone and i'm back to the initial view.

same if i search for a category, when i return from viewing a category, the search term i gave is gone.

i get that searching and favorites is the optimal way but sometimes you need to browse to know what to search for.

i also dislike having to hover over something to see the full title. having to hover over all the results instead of being able to see the full titles and at a glance find what i wanted to find ...

if i make the window bigger, it helps a bit but some longer titles are still cut off.

besides these gripes, i actually like it. search results are pretty much instantaneous and the whole app doesn't feel slow as some others i've tried in the past.

should i make a github issue for my issues or is that a waste of time?

I would add a bottom status bar so you can give immediate feedback when launching a new viewer. The initial lag was so long i ended up starting the same stream 3 times because i was unsure the click had registered.

Thanks for all your efforts. Will definitely check this out.

I have to say that IPTV apps across all platforms have a horrendous UX and are especially slow and clunky. I always felt that there's so much to improve in the space and I'm happy to see this project, looks promising judging from the description (although I haven't been using IPTV for a while now and can't try this).

https://tivimate.com/ is about the nicest, but yes the IPTV scene doesn't have a nice UX at all, naming conventions (or lack of) especially.

On Android TV, I prefer Sparkle TV (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.hedekonsult...) than Tivimate.

Unfortunately this one looks good at first but fails some basic UI. There is no information on what the stream is doing, so if it fails to fetch any data it'll just sit there spinning with no feedback. Hypnotix (a similar app) has the same issue, it's very annoying and you'd imagine easy to fix.

I've been using https://iptvx.app on my iPad / Apple TV. It looks pretty decent, but a lot of them look extremely ugly.

I'm not a user of IPTV services and haven't really heard about it.

I found this which lists apps and services that provide IPTV:

https://github.com/iptv-org/awesome-iptv

Is that kind of service common in some parts of the world? Do people set up their own IPTV servers to share content? What are the most popular use cases?

From time to time we use it. My wife is from South America but we live in Europe, bunch of channels she wanna watch aren't available legally here so it's the only way.

That list seems to have been cleaned up last year, this is the previous version that contains more providers: https://github.com/iptv-org/awesome-iptv/pull/169/files

I personally prefer using legal IPTV providers (e.g. https://polbox.tv/en/ for Polish TV, https://ibox.ie for UK and Irish, etc), though having to use VPNs for the content I already paid for is getting annoying.

Reading through the list of providers on your link, I think the answer is that yes, it's more common in the parts of the world, and those parts aren't necessarily the US.

> Do people set up their own IPTV servers to share content? What are the most popular use cases?

Most people I know use it to watch (pirated) sports broadcasts that are either very fragmented (So you'd have to subscribe to 5 providers, which is very expensive) or not available in the geographic location. Personally I use it to watch Sky UK, which isn't available in my location even if I wanted to pay for it.

You can self-host an IPTV server with https://ersatztv.org + Plex. I've recently set that up just for fun and there's people running channels with real old ads from their childhood just for nostalgia reasons.

Does plex stream the IPTV content directly to the plex clients running on things like Roku or Apple TV or it only works for the plex browser client?

Plex is just the source for the files that ErsatzTV is using, the encoding / streaming is done by ErsatzTV.

You can then use any IPTV app on any platform and paste in your ErsatzTV URL.

Probably not a great idea to link to a bunch of pirated streams. Some of those are official but a lot of them are not.

Init7 provides all their TV7 channels via IPTV: https://www.init7.net/en/tv/channels/

You can choose between multicast or HLS. This only works if Init7 is your ISP of course.

How does it compare to "yuki-iptv"?

https://codeberg.org/liya/yuki-iptv

I don't think apps running in a web browser are very efficient. Calling something like that "ultra-fast" doesn't seem right.

Does the framework matter if the UI is snappy?

But it's not a web browser? It now seems to use Tauri just for UI and do the actual rendering with mpv.

Are you living in a pre 2008 world or something? Stop being so pedantic.

There is merit to everything not being on the web. Some things don’t need to be. I don’t have any dog in the fight but seems to me maybe an IpTV service which would be tailored for you could potentially be more responsive as a local application instead. No need to knock that mentality as a generational thing or “old fashioned “

Edit: Merit to things “not” being on the web.

While I have an opposite mindset that not everything needs to be an app and can just be a website whether that is mobile or desktop

I don’t always subscribe to the expression “just use the right tool for the job” sometimes it’s nice to do things differently just to learn, but in this case, I still see some more benefits in this case of iota application being a bit more “synchronous” and local. But to be fair I have worked for a few years on a cloud streaming provider, but we had “set top boxes” to work with so I am maybe a bit biased.

But this app is local, no?

I knew a person judging women by their height. ... I am unsure why I recall this now! ; )

Nice to see something using IP multicast!

This doesn’t use multicast. Using multicast is essentially impossible unless you are the ISP or you just want to run it on LAN.

I don't see any channels worth watching though

You bring your own channels, so you may be misunderstanding.

Tauri + Angular. Curious choice.

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