Better and Cheaper Than IPTV | Hacker News Reader

Better and Cheaper Than IPTV

github.com

348 pointsxonery107 comments

For a no hacks alternative, I built TV Explorer. It puts the channel's published HLS stream into your browser with no interim steps. Uses the public GitHub list of more than 10,000 free channels.

https://tvexplorer.live

That is an unbelievably slick thing that you've got there.

It feels very light-weight, it's approximately instantly-responsive. Back button works. I don't understand the stats (or my contribution to them), but whatever.

(the closed-captioning pop-up causes some overlay issues for me, though)

moar edit: Upon further review with my very not-special desktop box, I'm reasonably confident that this is the quickest, most-responsive "TV-watching" experience I've had since analog NTSC left the scene ~eons ago. It's fast like switching from channel 11 to channel 13 used to be with the very quickest and most well-behaved of tuners.

What aren't you doing that everyone else is doing?

> What aren't you doing that everyone else is doing?

Seems to be the fact that there's no advertising, tracking or other SDKs and the entire JS is contained in two files.

Thank you for noticing!

> Back button works

Maybe a little too well... I tried a whole bunch of channels to get an idea of which ones work, and my history was too full to get out of the site. Maybe every channel change doesn't need to push to your history list.

Generally filling up the buffer is fine. It's perfectly normal that after viewing a certain number of documents one has to manually decide where to go.

You know what you need. A button that goes back but instead of going to the prior document goes to the first document with a different domain than the current one.

Yeah, I'm not convinced it's really the site's fault... I can understand the logic of wanting the back button to go back a channel, but also I generally want to go "out" of a page when I hit the back button, so there's no real one-size-fits-all answer.

But speaking only for myself, if history.pushState was removed from my browser I would probably be happier in the end. JavaScript SPA's abuse it 10x more often than they use it appropriately, I'd rather that if you're an SPA anyway, you implement your own in-app navigation and let my browser's mean "get me out of this app". Lord knows SPA's already reinvent every other web standard, why not one more...

I want a back button and a button to the left with a double arrow back like Rewind and for the browser to maintain both a buffer of prior pages and one at least as long of prior root sites with right-click showing this list

Very good point. Thank you, and I'll put a limit on it. 10?

Tangentially, I wonder why browsers can't store more than N history items... even from the same session.

Thank you so much! What a nice thing to hear.

The short version is that it uses my own engine, called Watson. I used to work for a small game studio inside a big company and my specialty was tooling. I had built my own before I started there and when they shutdown, it evolved into Watson[0].

It's lightweight because it's a static site with no server, it has no spying code or SDKs, and it puts the broadcasters HLS stream URL directly into a <video> element in your browser with minimal intervention.

[0] https://watsonengine.io

Looks potentially very nice but the majority of the channels I tried were "blocked in my area or not broadcasting"

Thanks for the feedback and I'm sorry that happened. Because the data comes from a public GitHub list of channels, the app has no way to know what will be geoblocked for you (or not) or actually online at the moment (or not) until you try to tune it -- very much like an old analog TV.

But... TV Explorer does keep track of what's tunable (with status lights down the left column) and also lets you scan in the background to find the ones that are live for you right now.

https://tvexplorer.live/help/25-things-18

Thanks, I'll play with it a bit more.

Magnificent thing you made, and the scanning is awesome. My problem is that it seems that I can't put more than one filter of the same type on i.e. (Spanish AND English), and if I switch between languages within the filter, the scan is reset.

Thank you so much for that!

It does only allow filtering by one language at a time, but you can build your hotbar of the stations you like that you find across any filters.

The scan works on the displayed results. If you change the filter, it starts with the new list -- but all the results are saved regardless.

Hope that makes it a bit bitter!

In case anyone else runs into this: the Stats section was not shown for me by default and I had to enable it in Settings.

Really great site though!

Quick suggestion: let us resize the channel browser when it's horizontal, and perhaps allow collapsing it altogether

Thanks so much for the compliment!

When your window is wide enough (on desktop), you should be able to drag the split point between the TV display and the channel list.

This is incredible! It loaded so fast on my mobile and I’m able to watch channels from all over. Amazing stuff man. It requires a thread of its own

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48325624

Thank you so much! Devs sometimes don't hear the good stuff about our work and I'm thrilled that you're enjoying it.

This is fantastic, as others have said. Could you talk a bit about how it's so wonderfully fast?

Thank you! That's so great to hear! I wrote a little bit about that here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969373

This is such a high quality TV viewing experience, I really love it! Amazing work!

Thank you very much. I'm delighted that you like it!

very cool. How would have this on actual TV? Load it in the built in browser?

You can cast from a Chrome browser to an Android TV or Chromecast device:

https://tvexplorer.live/help/ways-to-watch

and...

https://tvexplorer.live/help/25-things-07

I think https://tv.garden/ has more channels than your especially if i look at Japan

Both of these are amazing

Seems to depend on the country, tv.garden has nothing in Namibia, for example

This as a Jellyfin plugin would be awesome!

Just stays on the loading screen for me (Safari, iOS 26).

Same here. I wonder if it's hugged to death?

Love it

Thank you, kindly!

This is amazing! Can this be self hosted?

It is a static site that doesn't require a server and can be hosted anywhere.

Are there any instructions on self hosting?

This is probably the nicest IPTV site I’ve ever seen, nice work!!

I'm so honored that you feel that way, and thank you for saying so!

dis sum good stuff

Thanks bro!

that's INCREDIBLE! thanks so much for creating and sharing this!

The pleasure is mine, and thank you for saying so!

This is super cool. Thanks for building it.

Here are a couple of issues I'm seeing in Brave on Debian:

The player's mute button effectiveness lasts for fractions-to-seconds before the player unmutes itself. I instead need to mute the tab.

Fit Screen doesn't do anything when clicked.

Full Screen doesn't preserve the stream's aspect ratio and instead stretches to the displays' aspect ratio, which on my non-16:9 displays gets weird.

Floating Window has some glitchy draw behavior, among other bugs.

Still, I love it. It's great and I use it daily. Thanks again!

This situation where bots have to run a headless browser in a new profile is just stupid. Can we have the old internet back? Please? Cloudflare you're not stopping bots, you're just wasting effort on both sides while siphoning access logs and passwords to the NSA.

> I built it because I couldn't cast web video from my laptop to my TV: no Chromecast, no AirPlay.

Looks like Claude built it.

You're absolutely right and let me be honest about the honest load-bearing smoking-gun you point at.

That's the core tension — and you're right to call it out! Let me walk back my claims.

Yearly Quota Exceeded. Click here to buy the $69/minute plan.

I'm pretty sure it was built by a compiler, using libraries provided by Google and others. Until Claude can directly output machine code packaged for distribution, it's just another middleman between the source of intent (the human) and the final deliverable.

</sarcasm, mostly>

Claude helped me out for sure, i'm not a DLNA or FFMPEG beast, but i solved a problem I had and that's what matters. If it solved a problem you have, even better.

[flagged]

Dude didn't even harvest the quill himself. Back in my day you had to track a bird for hours just praying they'd drop a feather so you didn't have to actually catch the thing. Of course, the Smith family had a bow, so you'd maybe borrow a bow but then you were praying you didn't lose or break the arrow because then you're out the labor for the quill you didn't get AND the arrow!

[flagged]

Did the app work?

While I think responsible use of AI coding tools is possible, "working" is a low bar for software. Does it accomplish the intended function securely, performantly, with reasonable error handling?

I thought the whole point of turnstile was that it detects headless browsers and it's supposed to be "difficult" to bypass. Apparently this just simulates clicking on the checkmark. Is it really that easy?

Yes, kindof…

> was that it detects headless browsers

> Apparently this just simulates clicking on the checkmark

Not just that. It also spoofs a bunch of browser stuff.

A standard headless browser will probably get flagged.

If you can make the browser pass all the other checks going on in the background, clicking the checkmark is all that's left.

People have been automating WoW for a generation using things like peripherals duct taped to oscillating fans despite multi-million dollar budgets designed to defeat things far more sophisticated than this.

I would think of headless browser automation in exactly the same way you would about cheating in FPS video games. The red team always has the initiative and can win if they want to spend enough time and money.

With the right simulated events, a headless browser becomes indistinguishable from a real browser without platform detection. It's not hard to figure out that these headless browsers are running a software renderer on Linux. In time, they're just going to have to detect Linux users and force them to fill out one or multiple challenges if workarounds like these keep getting used.

The checkbox is just a small part of what the checks are doing. It's monitoring everything the browser is doing and how the browser is responding to certain events up until you tick the checkbox, at which point it determines if you need one of those "are you human" challenges or if you can pass without interruption, based on how bot-like you are.

The point of Turnstile is to sell a warm fuzzy feeling of security to website owners, block Tor users who don't enable JavaScript, and convince website owners to give a copy of all their traffic to the NSA for free.

Actual security is barely relevant except to the extent that if it doesn't add any security, the NSA might get worried that people will stop using Cloudflare.

Fake security - number of blocked users, which Cloudflare calls "bots" regardless of whether they're people or bots - is used in Cloudflare marketing.

Usually piracy software tries to maintain a little plausible deniability, but here this is suggesting it will help you stream this weekend's newly released $250m blockbuster.

the interface shows the top movies right now on https://www.themoviedb.org/

I’m not against piracy but the initial pitch made it seem like it’s more purely for trying to cast streams embedded in websites that you already are visiting and/or have access to, of which do not “allow” you to cast, or for whatever reason only work on a laptop and not on something like AirPlay. But the LLM-slop description of “random websites” in addition to the option for a TVDB API key confuse me as to what the actual focus is here.

It could just be streaming the trailer.

Main use case

I mean I get it, but also it's funny that you commented this 5 minutes after you edited the readme[1] to add in the exact type of plausible deniability I remarked was absent.

[1] - https://github.com/stupside/castor/commit/847abd1ad0dbe893fc...

Shhhh...

I suppose it searches your configured sources for that movie and comes back "not found"

Stremio does this. Stremio is a legal application that finds media from any configured plugin. You're supposed to add the illegal Torrentio plugin to automatically pirate media. By doing it this way, most development can take place in public.

A similar situation exists with the emulator Azahar and the illegal fork Azahar Plus which can automatically decrypt games.

Edit: lolno this project just has pirate sites built into it

Seems to be missing some context. What is this used for? Piracy?

It's an alternative way to cast media to your TV by way of somehow ripping the streaming video off said website or service.

It's a CLI that lets you select a movie, finds a matching stream from streaming websites, transcodes it, burns in subtitles in real time, and tells your TV to play it.

Do I need to bring my own sources or is there a maintained list?

You mean the streaming website source ? You can use the one present in the config.yaml of the project, it works fine.

it comes preconfigured with three different illegal pirate sites.

Looks like they removed now, and changed some language in Readme: https://github.com/stupside/castor/commit/692b2f18b8f6e99c32...

Lol. I wonder how that will hold up in court. "Your Honor, Castor is not designed for piracy" "Then why did the last version automatically access three pirate sites?"

What kind of streaming websites? Like, Netflix? Amazon Prime?

I agree, is the use case any video stream other than big established ( which already support casting)... So... bootleg sports streams?

It casts whatever stream's on the page, same as VLC plays whatever file you open.

But you didn't answer my question

I am not sure how this would help with piracy? It can only play a stream you already have access to, it doesn’t break encryption or anything.

The default config has a bunch of such sources: https://github.com/stupside/castor/blob/main/config.yaml

sources: - proxies: - "https://vidsrc-embed.ru" templates: movie: "/embed/movie/{itemID}" episode: "/embed/tv/{itemID}/{season}-{episode}"

  - proxies:
      - "https://1embed.cc"
      - "https://www.vidking.net"
    templates:
      movie: "/embed/movie/{itemID}"
      episode: "/embed/tv/{itemID}/{season}/{episode}"

  - proxies:
      - "https://www.rivestream.app"
    templates:
      movie: "/embed/torrent?type=movie&id={itemID}"
      episode: "/embed/torrent?type=tv&id={itemID}&season={season}&episode={episode}"

  - proxies:
      - "https://www.rivestream.app"
    templates:
      movie: "/embed?type=movie&id={itemID}"
      episode: "/embed?type=tv&id={itemID}&season={season}&episode={episode}"

You already have access to pirated streams. This app plays them for you. Check the source addresses in config.yaml.

Immediately worked for me on a simple Samsung bought 15+ years ago.

What's the best way to use it, write your own search to parse all the json pages https://vsembed.ru/movies/latest/page-1.json ?

This is interesting, instead of a command line interface it made me wonder what an interface right on the tv could look like.

Comparisons to watching tv, are usually a TV interface, with a TV device/app, be it an Android TV/Apple TV, etc.

Maybe I'm missing it, I couldn't see a tv interface.

The part where it can send video to any kind of tv is a pretty remarkable piece.

It's also remarkably "old" in a digital sense:

  Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is a set of interoperability standards for sharing home digital media among multimedia devices. Introduced 2004; 22 years ago.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLNA

  Google Cast is a proprietary protocol developed by Google for playing locally stored or Internet-streamed audiovisual content on a compatible consumer device. The protocol is used to initiate and control playback of content on digital media players, high-definition televisions, and home audio systems using a mobile device, personal computer, or smart speaker. The protocol was first launched on July 24, 2013; 12 years ago.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cast

Old also in this case keeps TVs useful longer

>Castor launches headless Chrome with a randomized fingerprint and stealth scripts to hide automation.

you lost me in there.

I work with browser fingerprinting, so I took a look at the repo to see what it actually does. From what I can tell, it only patches navigator, the Audio API, and the Canvas API. That is pretty basic, so it will likely get flagged easily.

Depends what you're trying to bypass. Cloudflare isn't as strict as Google.

depends on what you're trying to bypass in Cloudflare, turnstile or interstitial ?

Can this be used without a TV, lets say if I just want to play the streams with VLC?

I would hope it would do the "find and extract stream source" on the web page bit well. (This is quite hard on some sites). From there VLC can handle it.

I use "Web Video Caster" on Android to stream videos from websites to my TV. Free version is fine.

It's about as much effort as a torrent, so I don't see the point.

Docker version on MacOS might not find your TV.

You probably have to expose it to do Upnp through the VM that is needed for docker on Macos.

Can you cast to a Roku device with this?

I tried with v1.4.1, TVs running Roku TV do not seem to be supported at this point of time, at least "castor scan" does not yield any results. Roku TV does support Apple AirPlay as an add-on as you probably know.

- very stupid comment: i still have no idea what this project does even after reading the README

- can someone kindly explain what is the actual problem statement and what the author is trying to solve here?

You type in the ID of a movie and it pirates it for you

We're just throwing straight up piracy on HN now? We're vibing piracy now? Felonies via API?

Yes. Unironically yes. Except that it's a misdemeanor. It's a felony for the author of this code and for dang if he doesn't remove this post (distributing piracy tools), but it's a misdemeanor for the ones watching the streams.

FAAS

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