Morning all, If like me you've come to IPTV since the demise of cardsharing in the UK then heres a little tip to help you get the most out of your shiny new IPTV service. So, our cardsharing involved KODI and TVHeadend with a dual tuner PCI DVB-S2 card. What we did was rejig the channels to Freessat removing all the pay channels. then exported the this m3u file from TVHeadend using
Now you can download the m3u from your IPTV provider and then with the genius of cut n paste you can add your sat sources. However you can use the epg code from your IPTV provider to make this look seemless in KODI
so an exported channel from TVHeadend looks like this
#EXTINF:-1 logo=" http://192.168.0.2:9981/imagecache/775 " tvg-id="58c1b1fc1c1ae1b97976ba71327c06ef",BBC One HD http://192.168.0.2:9981/stream/channelid/2092024152?ticket=292D48866A259E39D2675700F931F388AAFA630F&profile=pass
My IPTV providers looks like this
#EXTINF:-1 tvg-id="BBC One London" tvg-name="UK: BBC ONE HD" tvg-logo=" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/BBC_One_2002.png " group-title="UK: ENTERTAINMENT",UK: BBC ONE HD http://xxxxxxxxx:xxxx/live/xxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com/xxxxxxx/281.ts
So in your downloaded providers m3u copy a channel you want to edit and paste it above or below itself. then replace the stream URL with the one you exported from TVHeadend and change the label so you can easily identify your new channel in the list or EPG. like so
#EXTINF:-1 tvg-id="BBC One London" tvg-name="UK: BBC ONE HD (SAT)" tvg-logo=" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/BBC_One_2002.png " group-title="UK: ENTERTAINMENT",UK: BBC ONE HD (SAT) http://192.168.0.2:9981/stream/channelid/2092024152?ticket=292D48866A259E39D2675700F931F388AAFA630F&profile=pass
In IPTV simple client you'll need to switch the m3u's location from remote to local, restart the service and clear your EPG caches.
My provider has a KODI addon and and m3u so I remove all the VOD content from the m3u because my provider updates this on a regular basis and use the KODI addon for that. I've had the service for three months and only have only had to re-edit the local m3u once when the UK sports channels changed names.
The reason I do this? You are always going to get the BEST HD picture from your satellite card and its never gonna buffer. In our house its surprising how much FTA TV my wife watches and this solution works really well for us. Thats not saying my IPTV providers service isnt any good. Its fantastic but having those rock solid FTA channels gives me extra piece of mind.
I'm using ACE-TV and you can find my original reddit review here
Hope someone finds this helpful
I do something similar with my tvheadned. I didn't know you can export the SAT channels as a list though - thanks for that. Editing the hundreds of channels in TVHeadend can be a nightmare.
If you want some good epg I've started using iptv-epg.com for their weekly EPG and they also have a M3U editor. Might be worth checking out! :)