LiveTVH.bundle

LiveTVH provides live TV streaming for Plex via Tvheadend, including metadata from Tvheadend's EPG, theTVDB, and The Movie DB.

Release notes

• 2017.05.22 - LiveTVH 1.2

  • New: Paginated channel lists with configurable # of items per page - this helps with longer channel lists (a necessity for IPTV providers with thousands of channels).
  • New: Tvheadend recordings for playback - located at the end of the first page of the channel list (a display bug with several Plex clients prevents placing it at the beginning of the list).
  • New: Codec identification using Tvheadend channel tags (experimental). This can enable direct streaming for H264-AAC streams on some clients (see setup notes below).
  • Updated: EPG parser to improve support for IPTV sources, including using images for a show if specified in the EPG (if other metadata providers are not available or are missing artwork).
  • Updated: EPG item limit to 20k items/20MB (again, for IPTV sources).
  • Updated: Plex clients will now display channel thumbnails as video clip objects (widescreen thumbnails) if metadata providers are disabled.
  • Updated: Code housekeeping (partially PEP8-conformant)
  • Bugfix: transcoding quality options not visible during playback
  • Bugfix: episode names from EPG were not set on Plex for Android

• 2017.05.14 - LiveTVH 1.1

  • EPG is no longer hard set - the number of EPG items requested is now based on the number of channels and hours of EPG data necessary (up to a maximum of 10,000 items or 10MB of data).
  • Bugfix: Thumbnails fallback to a channel logo when a show matches theTVDB but does not have a poster.
  • Bugfix: 12-hour time displays correctly on non-linux platforms.
  • Bugfix: Year displays for movies (when available from TMDb).

• 2017.05.10 - Initial release 1.0

Features

• EPG displayed as a simple list within each channel description, with a configurable time period to display in 12/24 hour time.

• Metadata and artwork lookup from theTVDB and The Movie DB, with asynchronous searches and loading to minimize channel list load times.

  If available through Tvheadend's EPG, searching theTVDB utilizes zap2it ID information for more exact matches and will fall back to searching by name if not available.

  If show artwork isn't available, LiveTVH will fallback to using images in the EPG data if available or Tvheadend's channel icons.

• Customized for different clients to display metadata more efficiently - Plex clients vary quite a bit in which fields they choose to display!

• Search results, metadata, and artwork caching - again, to minimize channel list load times.

• Tvheadend recordings accessible for playback, including rich metadata lookup.

• Tvheadend authentication info stored in HTTP headers where possible instead of being sent in the URL - this prevents the Tvheadend username and password from showing up in the Plex log files, for example.

• Tvheadend stream URL checking for availability prior to sending the stream to the client - this prevents long timeouts on the client if Tvheadend does not have an available tuner. This also sends the stream URL as an indirect object to Plex, which prevents the Tvheadend username and password from showing up in the Plex XML file.

  However, if the stream is direct played instead of running through the Plex Transcoder, the client will receive the username and password as part of the stream URL and show up in the clear in the client logs as Plex does not seem to support sending headers as part of the stream object.

Screenshots

Setup

1. Download LiveTVH.bundle and unzip to the Plex Media Server/Plug-ins directory, and rename (if necessary) to LiveTVH.bundle.

2. Set the LiveTVH preferences with the Tvheadend LAN IP address/hostname (or WAN for remote access), username, and password.

   

3. Watch!

Notes

• Codec identification - LiveTVH now uses Tvheadend channel tags to identify a channel's codecs and help Plex clients direct stream (tested with Plex Web and iOS). Create and set one of the following channel tags in Tvheadend as appropriate for each channel (Tvheadend supports editing multiple selections to make this a quick update):

  • H264-AAC - many DVB and IPTV sources, may permit direct streaming on Plex Web and iOS.
  • MPEG2-AC3 - ATSC and some DVB sources
  • MPEG2 - some IPTV sources
  • Setting the channel tag is not required - if a tag is not set, Plex will typically transcode as necessary.

  

• LiveTVH implements channels and playback of Tvheadend recordings. New recordings can be managed within Tvheadend or switching recordings to Plex DVR and tvhProxy).

• Channels will take a bit of time to load initially while metadata is fetched and speed up over time as images and metadata requests are stored in the cache (up to 30 days cache) - 20-30 channels per page works reasonably well.

• Watching remotely may require Tvheadend to have a public-facing address, as some clients will attempt to directly play the Tvheadend stream instead of running through the Plex transcoder.

  In this case, putting Tvheadend behind a reverse proxy with SSL is highly recommended, as the Tvheadend username and password is sent using HTTP Basic Authentication and is not secure over plain HTTP.

• LiveTVH preferentially searches for metadata on theTVDB using a show's zap2it ID if provided through Tvheadend's EPG.

  For example, zap2xml produces an XMLTV file with a zap2it ID for each show (if available) - Tvheadend includes this information in its EPG, and LiveTVH will use this ID to match the correct show. If a zap2it ID is not available, LiveTVH will fallback to searching by name.

  If searching theTVDB fails by zap2it ID but succeeds by name, LiveTVH will display the zap2it ID in the summary as an alert that the show's zap2it entry on theTVDB may be missing/incorrect - consider updating theTVDB.com with the correct information to improve search results. For example, many shows are in the older SHxxxxxx format, while the current format is EPxxxxxxxx.

  

Known Issues

• Plex Web currently does not display a detailed pre-play page - this is a bug/side effect of setting up the channels as movies instead of video clips to display posters correctly - channels can be played directly from the channel list.
• Plex for Xbox One fails to play channels - this may be due to a known Plex issue.
• Metadata searches are not localized.
• Plex does not provide options to flag a stream as interlaced - expect combing artifacts on Plex clients that do not support deinterlacing, unfortunately.