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For a no hacks alternative, I built TV Explorer. It puts the channel's published HLS stream into your browser with no interim steps. Uses the public GitHub list
by dtagames 3mo ago
For a no hacks alternative, I built TV Explorer. It puts the channel's published HLS stream into your browser with no interim steps. Uses the public GitHub list of more than 10,000 free channels.
https://tvexplorer.live https://tvexplorer.live
- nchagnet 3mo agoThis is such a high quality TV viewing experience, I really love it! Amazing work!
- dtagames 3mo agoThank you very much. I'm delighted that you like it!
- ssl-3 3mo agoThat is an unbelievably slick thing that you've got there. It feels very light-weight, it's approximately instantly-responsive. Back button works. I don't understand the stats (or my contribution to them), but whatever. (the closed-captioning pop-up causes some overlay issues for me, though) moar edit: Upon further review with my very not-special desktop box, I'm reasonably confident that this is the quickest, most-responsive "TV-watching" experience I've had since analog NTSC left the scene ~eons ago. It's fast like switching from channel 11 to channel 13 used to be with the very quickest and most well-behaved of tuners. What aren't you doing that everyone else is doing?
- mschuster91 3mo ago> What aren't you doing that everyone else is doing? Seems to be the fact that there's no advertising, tracking or other SDKs and the entire JS is contained in two files.
- dtagames 3mo agoThank you for noticing!
- ninkendo 3mo ago> Back button works Maybe a little too well... I tried a whole bunch of channels to get an idea of which ones work, and my history was too full to get out of the site. Maybe every channel change doesn't need to push to your history list.
- michaelmrose 3mo agoGenerally filling up the buffer is fine. It's perfectly normal that after viewing a certain number of documents one has to manually decide where to go. You know what you need. A button that goes back but instead of going to the prior document goes to the first document with a different domain than the current one.
- ninkendo 3mo agoYeah, I'm not convinced it's really the site's fault... I can understand the logic of wanting the back button to go back a channel, but also I generally want to go "out" of a page when I hit the back button, so there's no real one-size-fits-all answer. But speaking only for myself, if history.pushState was removed from my browser I would probably be happier in the end. JavaScript SPA's abuse it 10x more often than they use it appropriately, I'd rather that if you're an SPA anyway, you implement your own in-app navigation and let my browser's mean "get me out of this app". Lord knows SPA's already reinvent every other web standard, why not one more...
- michaelmrose 3mo agoI want a back button and a button to the left with a double arrow back like Rewind and for the browser to maintain both a buffer of prior pages and one at least as long of prior root sites with right-click showing this list
- dtagames 3mo agoVery good point. Thank you, and I'll put a limit on it. 10?
- rendaw 3mo ago
- dtagames 3mo agoThank you so much! What a nice thing to hear. The short version is that it uses my own engine, called Watson. I used to work for a small game studio inside a big company and my specialty was tooling. I had built my own before I started there and when they shutdown, it evolved into Watson[0]. It's lightweight because it's a static site with no server, it has no spying code or SDKs, and it puts the broadcasters HLS stream URL directly into a <video> element in your browser with minimal intervention. [0] https://watsonengine.io https://watsonengine.io
- SoftTalker 3mo agoLooks potentially very nice but the majority of the channels I tried were "blocked in my area or not broadcasting"
- dtagames 3mo agoThanks for the feedback and I'm sorry that happened. Because the data comes from a public GitHub list of channels, the app has no way to know what will be geoblocked for you (or not) or actually online at the moment (or not) until you try to tune it -- very much like an old analog TV. But... TV Explorer does keep track of what's tunable (with status lights down the left column) and also lets you scan in the background to find the ones that are live for you right now. https://tvexplorer.live/help/25-things-18 https://tvexplorer.live/help/25-things-18
- SoftTalker 3mo agoThanks, I'll play with it a bit more.
- pessimizer 3mo agoMagnificent thing you made, and the scanning is awesome. My problem is that it seems that I can't put more than one filter of the same type on i.e. (Spanish AND English), and if I switch between languages within the filter, the scan is reset.
- dtagames 3mo agoThank you so much for that! It does only allow filtering by one language at a time, but you can build your hotbar of the stations you like that you find across any filters. The scan works on the displayed results. If you change the filter, it starts with the new list -- but all the results are saved regardless. Hope that makes it a bit bitter!
- squigz 3mo agoIn case anyone else runs into this: the Stats section was not shown for me by default and I had to enable it in Settings. Really great site though! Quick suggestion: let us resize the channel browser when it's horizontal, and perhaps allow collapsing it altogether
- jusonchan81 3mo agoThis is incredible! It loaded so fast on my mobile and I’m able to watch channels from all over. Amazing stuff man. It requires a thread of its own
- liamwire 3mo agoThis is fantastic, as others have said. Could you talk a bit about how it's so wonderfully fast?
- dtagames 3mo agoThank you! That's so great to hear! I wrote a little bit about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969373
- boromi 3mo agovery cool. How would have this on actual TV? Load it in the built in browser?
- dtagames 3mo agoYou can cast from a Chrome browser to an Android TV or Chromecast device: https://tvexplorer.live/help/ways-to-watch https://tvexplorer.live/help/ways-to-watch and... https://tvexplorer.live/help/25-things-07 https://tvexplorer.live/help/25-things-07
- liquidnitrogen1 3mo agoI think https://tv.garden/ https://tv.garden/ has more channels than your especially if i look at Japan
- asimpletune 3mo agoBoth of these are amazing
- maxweylandt 3mo agoSeems to depend on the country, tv.garden has nothing in Namibia, for example
- drewrbaker 3mo agoThis as a Jellyfin plugin would be awesome!
- normie3000 3mo agoJust stays on the loading screen for me (Safari, iOS 26).
- b112 3mo agoSame here. I wonder if it's hugged to death?
- jarym 3mo agoLove it
- dtagames 3mo agoThank you, kindly!
- supersparrow 3mo agoThis is amazing! Can this be self hosted?
- nickzelei 3mo agoThis is probably the nicest IPTV site I’ve ever seen, nice work!!
- dtagames 3mo agoI'm so honored that you feel that way, and thank you for saying so!
- sharts 3mo agodis sum good stuff
- dtagames 3mo agoThanks bro!
- mcmoebius 3mo agothat's INCREDIBLE! thanks so much for creating and sharing this!
- dtagames 3mo agoThe pleasure is mine, and thank you for saying so!
- bwoah 3mo agoThis is super cool. Thanks for building it. Here are a couple of issues I'm seeing in Brave on Debian: The player's mute button effectiveness lasts for fractions-to-seconds before the player unmutes itself. I instead need to mute the tab. Fit Screen doesn't do anything when clicked. Full Screen doesn't preserve the stream's aspect ratio and instead stretches to the displays' aspect ratio, which on my non-16:9 displays gets weird. Floating Window has some glitchy draw behavior, among other bugs. Still, I love it. It's great and I use it daily. Thanks again!