pydreamtv

Stream IPTV to Discord.

Beware, this is in early stages but it does work. It needs a bit to get it going, but if you understand IPTV providers and how Discord voice chat works then it should make sense. The instructions are brief and makes assumptions that you understand the individual parts rather than going into details on how each stage works.

This janky bot does the following:

• Listens to commands on a server for tv commands
• Controls an instance of mpv via these commands
• The instance of mpv is used by Discord to stream the video
• A desktop audio loopback is needed to get the mpv sound to Discord. virtualmic is used for that.
• Downloads M3U and XMLTV files from your IPTV provider
• Stored the data in a MySQL database
• Searches and switches channels by looking stuff up in the database and controlling mpv

What you'll need

• This has only been tested in Linux, so for now you need Linux
• Python 3+
• MPV installed and working
• MySQL installed somewhere and working
• Discord installed and working
• A Discord account and server
• A registered application in Discord with a bot token
• An IPTV account along with:
  • A URL for the channel listings, preferrably as an M3U file
  • A URL for the schedule, preferrably as an XMLTV file
• virtualmic installed and working to provide desktop audio to the stream
• PDM installed to manage dependencies

How to do this

With all the stuff above installed, do the following:

1. Run pdm install to install the virtual environment and dependencies
2. Rename .env.example to .env in the src directory
3. Fill out the .env file with the necessary details
4. Create a database in MySQL called pydreamtv
5. Use the SQL scripts to create the necessary tables
6. Change to the src directory
7. Run pydreamtv/bot.py
8. Wait for the channel and programme databases to fill
9. Go to a voice channel in Discord
10. Type tv random in chat
11. When the mpv window appears, stream the window to the voice chat
12. Swap the desktop audio to the virtual mic output

Limitations

• Discord streaming audio is terrible. It uses the Opus codec and the audio quality is controlled by server boosts. Level 1 boosts can get 128Kbps quality
• There is a fallback channel which is used when a channel is offline, just pick a channel URL from the playlist file, preferrably one that is reliable
• The bot attempts to keep the mpv window open as much as possible so that Discord doesn't lose the window handle, but it can be hit and miss sometimes
• This script assumes that the categories from the channel playlists contain some country codes at the start
• The playlist imported does make some assumptions about the channel metadata format. YMMV.