re: What IPTV is everyone using?

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I have everything needed to do this! Patience will be the problem because set up seems like a lot.

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i took the plunge

i will say if you are using plex, then DO NOT BE AFRAID TO GO BACK TO THE START MULTIPLE TIMES.

it breaks down to a few simple steps:

- donate $10 to IPT and the IPTV option turns on for you. cancel at any time; each $10 is good for a month and gets you IPTV with 2 tuners.

- good lord..the channels. the channels. this is trial and error. the first time i grabbed the local abc, nbc, cbs and fox only nbc worked. you can search keywords like 'nashville' which will show you there are probably 5-6 redundant channels for each.

grab them all. throw them into the plex tuner (more later). test each one and see which streams the best and note that in a spreadsheet or something. in fact, you're probably going to have to do this for every channel you want.

- START SMALL! dont get greedy and grab 200 channels and find 50% don't work. just take your time, grab channels you REALLY WANT and test them to make sure the stream is solid and if not, grab the alternate channels and test them all.

- threadfin is pretty easy. run the compiled github code for your platform. i'm on Windows 10 and running it on the same server Plex is on. use the guide on IPT to 'get started' but you're going to end up having to tweak it.

- your TV plex client is the weak link (along with your connection). if it all possible, test multiple clients (samsung plex app, roku plex app, fire tv plex app, etc) while hard-wired so you can rule out wifi hiccups vs streaming hiccups and whether it runs better on Client A vs Client B. this will keep you from going crazy and you want the best client & connection if you're watching LSU with friends so get that straight ahead of time.

- DO NOT go crazy in threadfin tweaking each channel, importing station logos, etc. you will blow this out again and again and again. you can do that once the dust settles, but its stupid while you're getting your channel guide set up. your initial goal is getting ROBUST CHANNELS THAT DONT BUFFER so focus on that in the beginning. once you are confident in your channels, you can mess with the other stuff. Again, you don't want your friends to laugh in your face because you grabbed a shitty ESPN stream and it freezes 5 minutes into the football game. GET THIS ON LOCK BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE

- add your threadfin server as a virtual DVR in plex. this will also bring in the channel list you've set up. go into plex and try to tune the channels.

thats it. unfortunately you can't update your channel list in threadfin and see it in plex so you have to 'delete' the dvr each time you want to pull in an updated list of channels. a minor problem. it takes all of 1 minute to regenerate the guide in plex.

- backups are key; i'm still sorting through that but in threadfin you can set up to 3 'alternate' streams as backups and supposedly this will prevent any hiccups as the backups take over immediately anytime buffering might occur.

DID I MENTION START SMALL? You may give up on the whole thing if you think all you have to do is select your favorite 200 channels and you go to show off how smart you are to your 9 year old boy and half of them refuse to play. You're not trying to recreate Xfinity or DirectTV; in the beginning just work on a small, core set of channels that work really really REALLY well and once you have some confidence under your belt as to what you did to make those work, slowly add all the other crap you probably will never watch anyway.

what do you expect for $10? anyway, still alot to learn and i'm not ready to post any type of guide yet because i'm probaby doing it all wrong.


ETA it was pretty sweet seeing those PPV channels just show up and watch random shite on them.

ETA2 my wife said 'oh you're just doing this so you can get the Playboy channel' I'm like 'WHAT YEAR IS IT??' i told her 'yep, but its scrambled so we'll have to squint and use our imagination when watching it.'