IPTV not great on emby

[dysw 0]

Hej Everybody

Finally I fired up my emby server. It has a lot of quirks im trying to work out. I will take them one at a time.

IPTV or LIVE TV. Because the IPTV add-on doesn't do what it is suppose to. (It doesn't accept m3u files)

WHAT did i do...

1: Added the m3u link in LIVETV in the settings.

2: LIVE tv appears on the home screen. Web interface etc. Fine. Its working.

Now the problem is that you have 10K channels and no way to sort them.

3: Brain burst. "Collections".

4: I add the channels i like to one collection. Give each channel a logo. Spending hours on it. Works great.

 

12-24-36 hours later my "IPTV collection" is gone, all the channels has lost their images. Why ?

Is still appears under /var/lib/data/collections. But is not shown in emby. I can add them all again. spend hours and it all happens again gone.

"Its not a bug, its a feature." Well im not sure what to say about that. Any advise would be appreciated.

Edited September 14, 2020 by dysw
Wrongly places topic. Please move to "IPTV forum"

[Sammy 735]

Just create an m3u tuner in LiveTV setup. The iptv plugin probably should be removed.

[dysw 0]

Thats just what i did.

My question is why does emby delete my collection of channels and remove the images I added manually.

[CBers 6766]

Have you tried xTeVe ?

 

[kaj 240]

@CBers do you have a guide in how to install xteve on a Synology NAS? I can't find one

 

[CBers 6766]

1 minute ago, kaj said:

@CBers do you have a guide in how to install xteve on a Synology NAS? I can't find one

 

No, sorry.

Have you asked in the xTeVe Discord ?

 

[kaj 240]

18 minutes ago, CBers said:

No, sorry.

Have you asked in the xTeVe Discord ?

 

I'll try, thanks

[Carlo 4330]

8 hours ago, Sammy said:

Just create an m3u tuner in LiveTV setup. The iptv plugin probably should be removed.

The IPTV plugin isn't made for TV use but more for people who use if for security cams and things like that.  That's exactly what I use it for.

Emby wasn't really designed for use with thousand of channels but more for cable and OTA broadcasts.  So if you use a tool such as xteve (run it on a PC) you can point your NAS/Emby install at it to get your filtered list of channels.  The only time xteve will do anything is on the schedule you set to pull your m3u file filter it and then do nothing again until Emby pulls the list from it.  99.99% of the time it's dormant so it shouldn't pose a problem running on a network attached PC.

[dysw 0]

Thanks for the advise. Will try to make my own m3u file with less channels.

 

BUT nobody has addresses the main problem. If I add any channels to a collection why does emby delete this collection after some time ? This is entirely embys area.

[Carlo 4330]

Hi, Are you sure it's not another user deleting the collection?

Did you take a look at the log file regarding the deleted collection?  For anyone to really comment they would need to see the log with these entries to have any idea what the trigger is.

[Luke 37029]

Hi there, we are working on improving it. Thanks for the feedback.

[mlcarson 13]

Emby doesn't have great channel management features but you can create your own M3U file for IPTV and utilize the built-in Emby guide data to create a really nice channel guide.  I start mine off with a spreadsheet and create a CSV file with provider's channel name (primary key), tvg--name, channel-id, and tvg-shift.    You need the channel name or some data field that the IPTV provider uses to uniquely identify a channel that you can map to the stream id.    The stream id's can change but usually the channel names don't. 

Emby's guide data seems to match on channel-id first and then tvg-name.   So if you have a lot of channels from your IPTV provider that match up with your cable TV provider, DISH, or DirecTV -- use the channel numbering of this provider to automatically map channel-id's to guide data.  For the remaining channels, you'll have to rely upon tvg-name mappings but you don't want Emby matching on channel-id's from a guide data provider -- the best way for that not to happen is to use channel-id's with a decimal component.  So, channel 201 becomes 201.0.  The OTA guide data will use subchannels but they are typically always one digit to the right of the decimal so use two digits: 31.01 rather than 31.1.  There are a lot of ways of dealing with it but that's mine.   You have most of your channels match up with a primary guide data provider via channel number and everything else via the tvg-name.  If you don't like using a guide sources tvg-name, you can always map channels manually but this will keep it automated.   So creating a CSV file, let's you do a custom channel guide. 

I download the provider's M3U file via wget and break it down via two sed operations to create a new CSV file with just the channel name and the stream fields.  I then us an awk script (6 lines of code) to create an M3U file from the two previously mentioned CSV files -- let's call them channels.csv and streams.csv.    So awk goes through the streams.csv and creates an array which I can reference for the stream and then prints out a new emby.m3u file as it processes the channels.csv file. Linux has the sed and awk tools automatically installed.    I created a 4 line bash file to call wget to get the m3u file, two lines of sed operations to create the streams.csv, and a call to the awk file to create the new M3U from the streams.csv and the channels.csv.   This bash file then gets called via a cron job which automates the entire thing.   So for about a dozen lines of scripting I have the M3U file update of streams automated. 

You can create an almost complete M3U file just via a spreadsheet but I always ended up doing a copy/paste from spreadsheet to text editor in the end which is why I finally broke down and used the Linux text processing tools: sed and awk for automation.

My understanding is that Xteve can do a lot of this for you but Emby doesn't require it for IPTV like Plex does so decided not to go down this path.  There's also M3ufilter which can probably do anything but I found it more complicated/time consuming than just dealing with sed/awk.   There's also many online M3U editor sites but honestly, it's just a text file and not a complicated format to figure out.  The great thing about Emby in the end though is the guide sources.  You seem to be able to add as many guide sources as necessary to complete an M3U guide.  You can't do that with Schedules Direct.   And most IPTV providers don't have great guide data like Emby does.

Edited October 3, 2020 by mlcarson