IPTV M3U Reader (M3UIPTV)

An Enigma2 plugin for set-top boxes (OpenPLi, OpenViX, OpenATV, VTi, and other oe-alliance / openpli-oe-core based images) that turns IPTV playlists and portals into native Enigma2 bouquets — with live TV, catch-up/timeshift playback, Video on Demand, EPG import, and picons, all managed from the box itself or from a browser.

Features

• Multiple provider types, each with its own screen/API integration:
  • M3U / M3U8 playlists (static URL or dynamic list, #EXTINF metadata parsing)
  • Xtream Codes (XC) panels via the player_api.php API
  • Stalker / Ministra portals (MAG STB emulation, MAC-derived device IDs)
  • TVHeadend servers (playlist + XMLTV endpoints)
  • VOD-only sources (m3u or plain name,url text lists)
• Automatic bouquet generation with configurable strategy: per-group bouquets, a single "All Channels" bouquet, both, or one provider bouquet with FROM BOUQUET sub-bouquets per group. Bouquet name casing and provider-native channel numbering (LCN/TSID) are configurable.
• Catch-up / timeshift playback directly from the EPG grid, with a dedicated player (accelerating seek, resume points, EOF handling) and support for several catch-up URL schemes: default, append, shift, Xtream (xc/xc60), Stalker, and Flussonic.
• Video On Demand: movies and TV series listings with posters, paging, search, and per-provider VoD/series blacklists.
• EPG import integration with the third-party EPGImport plugin (static or auto-discovered XMLTV URLs), plus a built-in local EPG helper server for Stalker portals that don't expose persistent EPG data.
• Picon handling: multithreaded picon downloads that link into your existing picon path without overwriting picons you already have.
• Per-provider substitutions and blacklists — regex-based overrides for channel name/EPG id/service type/catchup type, and group/category exclusion lists, editable per provider.
• Web Manager: an optional built-in web UI for adding, editing, and deleting providers from any browser on your network, including an editor for per-provider substitutions.
• Scheduled auto-updates — refresh playlists/EPG automatically on selected days and times.
• Translated into English, Bulgarian, German, Spanish, Finnish, French, Italian, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

Requirements

• An Enigma2-based receiver image (oe-alliance / openpli-oe-core derived).
• Python 3 packages available on the image: requests, multiprocessing, zoneinfo.
• Optional but recommended: the EPGImport plugin, for EPG data.
• Optional: ServiceApp, for alternate playback engines on some catch-up configurations (auto-detected if installed).

Installation

From an image feed / package manager

If your image feed carries the plugin, install it like any other package, e.g. from the receiver's package manager or over SSH:

opkg update
opkg install enigma2-plugin-extensions-m3uiptv

Building an .ipk yourself

./build.sh

This packages src/ together with the metadata in meta/ into an .ipk you can install with opkg install.

From source (development)

python setup.py install

setup.py installs the plugin under Plugins.SystemPlugins.M3UIPTV and compiles the translation catalogs via setup_translate.py.

Yocto / OpenEmbedded

enigma2-plugin-systemplugins-m3uiptv.bb is provided for images built with bitbake (oe-alliance-core or openpli-oe-core layers).

Getting started

After installing, restart Enigma2 (or reboot). Two new menu areas appear:

• Menu → Setup → IPTV
  • Settings — global plugin configuration (see below).
  • Playlist manager — add, edit, delete providers and (re)generate bouquets.
• Menu → Video On Demand (main menu and/or extensions/blue-button menu, depending on settings) — browse Movies and TV Shows across all VoD-capable providers.

To add a provider: open Playlist manager → Add, choose a provider type (M3U/M3U8, Xtream Codes, Stalker, TVHeadend, or VOD), fill in the URL/credentials, pick a catch-up type and bouquet strategy, then save and generate. Regenerating pulls the latest playlist/API data and rewrites the provider's bouquets, EPG source files, and picons.

Global settings (Settings)

Setting	Purpose
Enabled	Master on/off switch for the plugin
Internet check timeout	Seconds to wait for a connectivity check before fetching playlists (or off)
Request timeout	HTTP timeout (seconds) used for playlist/API requests
Local EPG server port	TCP port for the built-in EPG helper (default 9010), mainly used by Stalker portals
Web manager enabled / port / require login	Turn the browser-based manager on/off, its TCP port (default 8090), and whether it requires your box's system login
Show in main menu / Show in extensions menu	Where the Video On Demand entry appears
Show VoD posters	Toggle poster art downloads for movies/series
Picon download threads	Concurrency for picon downloads (50–1000)
Bouquet name case	Original / lowercase / UPPERCASE for generated bouquet titles
Catch-up EOF timeout	Delay before honoring end-of-file during catch-up playback
Fallback picon path	Picon directory used when auto-detection fails
VoD play system	Service type used to play VoD streams
Scheduled updates	Enable auto-refresh, plus time and days of the week

Catch-up / timeshift playback

Events with archive data show a catch-up icon in the EPG grid; pressing Play launches the catch-up player instead of a live zap. Archive duration and URL construction are read per-channel (from playlist attributes such as tvg-rec, catchup-days, timeshift) or derived from the provider's API (Xtream tv_archive_duration, Stalker portal calls). Supported catch-up types: default, append, shift, xc/xc60 (Xtream), stalker, flussonic, and vod.

Web Manager

Enable Web manager enabled under Settings to manage providers from a browser at http://<receiver-ip>:8090/ (port configurable). The page lets you list, add, edit, and delete providers for all supported types, with fields shown/hidden per provider type (URL, credentials, MAC/serial/device ID for Stalker, refresh interval, EPG source, playback systems, output format, catch-up type, picon options, bouquet/channel-ordering strategy, and auto-update scheduling).

When Require login is enabled (the default), access is protected with HTTP Basic Auth checked against your receiver's own system credentials — the same login used for Telnet/FTP/the stock web interface — not a separate plugin password. Deleting a provider through the web UI fully tears it down: bouquets, VoD cache, EPG sources, and picons are all removed.

For M3U/M3U8 and Xtream Codes providers, a Substitutions button opens an editor for that provider's per-channel name/EPG id/service type/catch-up type overrides (see Substitutions below) — add or remove rules and their key:value overrides without touching substitutions.xml by hand. Saving takes effect the next time the provider's bouquets are regenerated.

Per-provider extras

• Substitutions — per-channel overrides for M3U/M3U8 and Xtream Codes providers, used when a provider's own playlist/API data for a channel is missing or wrong. Four independent override types are available:

  • servicename — overrides the channel's displayed name.
  • epgid — overrides the id used to match this channel against EPG data.
  • servicetype — overrides the Enigma2 playback system used for this channel (1 = DVB, 4097 = GStreamer/HiSilicon, 5002 = Exteplayer3, the latter requiring the ServiceApp plugin).
  • catchuptype — overrides the playback system used for catch-up on this channel (same values as servicetype); M3U providers only.

  Overrides can be edited from Playlist manager in the Web Manager (see below) or by hand-editing substitutions.xml, stored per provider at <config>/M3UIPTV/<scheme>/substitutions.xml (<scheme> is the provider's internal id, shown in the manager). The file is read the next time the provider is loaded / bouquets are regenerated — regenerate after editing it by hand. See src/substitutions.example.xml for a complete example covering all four types.

  The file's root <substitutions> element holds any of the four child elements above, each holding one or more <substitution> rules:

  <substitutions>
    <servicename>
      <substitution search-line="#EXTINF" search-regex="tvg-id=&quot;(.*?)&quot;">
      <![CDATA[
        805:AAAA 1,
        806:BBBB 1
      ]]>
      </substitution>
    </servicename>
  </substitutions>

  Each <substitution> rule's body is a list of key:value lines (a trailing comma is optional; a line must contain exactly one :). How key is determined, and whether search-line/search-regex matter, differs by provider type:

  • M3U/M3U8: search-line selects whether search-regex is matched against the raw #EXTINF: line (#EXTINF) or the resolved stream URL (#URL); it must be exactly one of those two values. search-regex must contain exactly one capture group — the captured text is looked up as key in the rule's key:value list, and the matching value becomes the override. Multiple <substitution> rules (even with different search-line/search-regex values) can be listed under the same type to combine several matching strategies.
  • Xtream Codes: search-line/search-regex are not used — matching is done directly against the provider's numeric id: the Xtream stream_id for servicename/servicetype, and epg_channel_id for epgid. catchuptype substitutions are not applied for Xtream Codes providers.

• Blacklists: per-provider text files listing groups/categories (or VoD movies/series) to exclude from bouquet generation; an example blacklist listing every discovered group is generated automatically on first import.

• M3U media library: an M3U provider can optionally pull its VoD/series catalogue from an attached Xtream Codes API instead of (or alongside) its M3U playlist.

Translating

Translation sources live in po/ as gettext .po files, one per language, generated from po/m3uiptv.pot. Use po/updateallpo-multiOS.sh to refresh catalogs from source strings, and setup.py/setup_translate.py to compile .po into the .mo files shipped with the plugin.

License

Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.

Maintainers

DimitarCC, Huevos — see the GitHub repository for issues and contributions.