ErsatzTV VS PlutoIPTV

hahaha I learned everything I know from /r/Datahoarder, /r/buildapcsales(for the HDDs, currently have 24tb's) and ErsatzTV for the IPTV server.

Greetings, all! I am attempting to set up a fantasy TV station for my friends. Currently, I am using ersatztv for the backend, which provides me with all of the content and channel creation and management. So far I am happy with it because it provides hardware transcoding for the streams on consumer hardware.

Yep, another one is https://ersatztv.org/

Personally, my preferred one is ErsatzTV. It's for a couple of reasons but they mainly come down to not being tied directly to the media server application itself.

ErsatzTV: https://ersatztv.org/ — custom IPTV channels from my media library (e.g., a comedy channel, 1980s movies, etc)

Projects like DizqueTV and https://ersatztv.org/ were created to emulate a HDHomeRun to make “fake live tv” available in Plex’s Live TV interface, using Library content to emulate live TV channels you would pick up over an antenna.

I have a potato (J4105) Plex server and tried DizqueTV, ErsatzTV and Jason's DizqueTV fork very recently. But I couldn't get it stable unfortunately. When one series would work great, another one wouldn't, or even refused to play. Or certain program boundaries made the player crash from time to time. And watermark overlays were another story of it's own.

Use https://github.com/evoactivity/PlutoIPTV

I tried using this repo, https://github.com/evoactivity/PlutoIPTV, to generate an IPTV playlist but it created an .m3u8 file. I was able to import it into Jellyfin, and used SchedulesDirect for the Guide Data. This seemed to work, but when I tried watching a live PlutoTV channel (using the Roku Jellyfin client) the HD of my Jellyfin server was thrashed, which I assume was due to a transcoding issue.

evoactivity/PlutoIPTV: Grab EPG & M3U from Pluto.tv (github.com)

Linux Mint changed the default provider for channels. You are always welcome to add/remove sources to your liking. For instance, to add 256 TV Channels from Pluto, you can create a .m3u8 playlist with PlutoIPTV (or just a select few, if you set up your favorites). Then go to Providers (tv icon) > Add New Provider > select Local m3u file. You will then have to switch between the Free-TV set of channels and PlutoTV channels. (Hypnotix will remember your last selection if you close and re-open.)

The easiest way is download the APK and use a VPN, if you have a server based in the US you can run this script and download the m3u with the US channels: https://github.com/evoactivity/PlutoIPTV