Live TV and recording

Multipass plays channels you already have. It does not sell you channels, does not bundle any, and does not add anything to your guide that you did not put there.

Everything here is optional. If you never add a source, live TV stays out of the way on every screen.

What you can connect

Source	What it is
M3U playlist	A playlist URL, usually with a separate guide URL. What most providers hand you
Xtream Codes login	A server address, a username, and a password. The most common subscription format
HDHomeRun	A network tuner box on your own network, for aerial or cable

Settings → IPTV → Add source.

Your provider’s address and credentials never leave your server. Playback goes through the server like everything else, so a device on the other side of the world plays your channels over your own connection, and your provider only ever sees your server.

Several logins on one subscription

Providers sell “three simultaneous streams” and then deliver it as three separate username and password pairs, each good for exactly one stream at a time. Open a second stream on one login and the provider kills the first.

Add all of them under the source, and the server hands them out as needed. Three people can watch three different channels, and the fourth is told the subscription is full rather than knocking somebody else off.

The server also opens one connection per channel, not one per viewer. Two people on the same channel, plus a recording of it, is one upstream connection, not three.

The guide

Guide data comes from XMLTV, which nearly every provider offers alongside the playlist. Put the guide URL in with the source and it fills itself in, refreshing on its own.

The result is a full channels-by-time grid on the TV and in a browser: what is on now, what is next, and one press to record.

Getting better guide data

Provider guide data varies from excellent to two days of “To Be Announced”. If yours is poor, the answer we recommend is Dispatcharr, a separate free app you run yourself. It consolidates your provider subscriptions and guide sources, including proper commercial guide data, and re-exports them as one playlist and one guide.

Point Multipass at Dispatcharr’s playlist and guide URLs and you get programme artwork, proper episode identity for series recording, categories, and credits.

We deliberately stay out of the guide-data business. We do not resell it, do not need an account with anyone, and do not want to be in the middle of that relationship.

Curating your channels

A provider list of 4,000 channels is unusable as delivered. Settings → IPTV → Channels is where the owner fixes that: rename channels, renumber them, and hide the ones nobody will ever watch, in bulk.

Separately, every person can star their own favourites from a channel card or the guide, and starred channels pin to the top of their guide and their Live TV row. Curation is the owner’s job; favourites are personal.

There is also a master switch. Turning live TV off hides it everywhere, on every app, and keeps your sources and channel edits so that turning it back on restores everything exactly.

Pausing live TV

Every live stream is buffered to disk as you watch, so you can pause, rewind, and fast-forward back to now, with a Go Live control. Two hours by default, adjustable between ten minutes and a day in advanced settings.

Recording

From the guide, click a programme:

• Record this showing
• Record series for every future episode

Padding is per recording: start up to ten minutes early, run up to two hours late, for the football that never finishes on time. You can also set a default padding for everything in advanced settings so you stop having to think about it.

Recordings appear in your library like anything else: artwork, description, resume, watched marks. They are files on disk in the folder you set under Settings → File management, and they stay yours if you ever stop using Multipass.

When there are not enough streams

The server knows how many simultaneous connections your subscription allows and how many recordings are already booked. Schedule one that will not fit and it says so at the time, rather than silently failing at three in the morning.

If a recording is about to need a stream someone is watching on, that person is warned five minutes ahead, with one button to cancel the recording and another to switch over to the channel being recorded.

Seeing what is going on

Stats shows who is watching what right now, including which live channel, and lets you stop a stream.

Deleting recordings

Recordings pile up. Settings → Libraries → the recordings library → Media lists them all with sizes and checkboxes, and deleting one there sends the file to the recycle bin and clears its recording entry so it does not come back as a ghost.

Automatic retention rules (“keep the last five”) are not built yet.

Where live TV is not

Two deliberate gaps:

• A capped profile needs “allow unrated” turned on to see live TV at all, because live channels carry no certification. Per-programme rating enforcement from the guide is not built. See Parental controls.
• Live TV never enters a queue or a playlist. It has its own model.