[Feature] Restrict users to channel

[albertcard]

Add a feature that restricts non-admin users from selecting channels and instead forces the admin account(s) to assign channels to users so to not allow your users full access to all your channels.

Example:

I have a subscription/provider for LiveTV.

I use Dispatcharr as an M3U and EPG proxy for that LiveTV provider.

My subscription only allows one concurrent stream to a single channel at a time. If more than one stream is started to different channels, the older channel connection gets booted.

However, with Dispatcharr as the proxy, I can connect to the same channel with Jellyfin, Plex, neTV all at the same time and it all is seen as one connection to my provider.

If I want to share neTV to family members to be able to stream the same channel (for sports) but we're all in different locations, I want to make sure they're locked to that one channel and not changing channels which would then interrupt everyone's stream since I can only connect to one concurrent stream through Dispatcharr (if that makes sense)

[jvdillon]

I see your point. Let me ponder how to set this up.

[jvdillon]

Ive added this at the group level (from settings) but that might not be what you wanted.
I also added some stream contention logic.

Pseudo-code of new transcode request:

  # Check source capacity first
  if source at max_streams:
    if user has streams on this source:
      kill user's oldest stream on this source (reclaim their own slot)
    else:
      reject "source at capacity" (can't take others')
  
  # Then check user quota
  if user at max_streams:
    kill user's oldest stream (any source)

  # Proceed with new stream

[albertcard]

That is a nice feature. Thank you for the work. I'll have to play with it when I'm back in town (at home).

However, I'm more so saying that if there's a football game on my local CBS channel, I want to give someone the neTV URL, their own account login and the only channel they'd see is CBS because I selected that they'd only be allowed to see / use that channel I selected

Similar to how Plex allows you to dial in which libraries a user can see when they have access to your Plex server.

[albertcard]

I see! We can restrict users to certain Groups. This is pretty close to what I was looking for.

Do you think it's possible to list based on Groups or Name? Like have a radio button to switch between listing it by groups (how it already does) or by the individual stream names?

If yes, I could open a new feature request

[jvdillon]

You mean to say youd still prefer the granularity to be individual channel?

[albertcard]

If possible, yes.

My IPTV provider subscription has thousands of channels so I can see the need for groups.

But I use dispatcharr to narrow that down to about 100 channels to reflect much like a local U.S. basic cable package.

So it's not much to sort through but it'd be nice to create a user account for each of my other family members who don't live in my local area who can't catch the same football game on their local CBS and only share that one channel.

If all 5 of us are tuned into that 1 channel, it's proxied by dispatcharr and to my IPTV provider, it looks like only 1 connection even though there's 5 of us watching in different geographic locations.

[jvdillon]

Sg. Let me ponder that some more.

In the meantime I made it so if multiple users tune to the same live stream, and that stream is currently transcoded, then they all share the transcode thus costing your provider only one stream. This was already more or less how VOD worked but now it extends to Live.

[albertcard]

For the time being, I have a workaround through Dispatcharr. I created 2 new Groups in Dispatcharr (NFL Games 1 && NFL Games 2)

... then assigned each of them to 1 Channel each

Then re-created my neTV docker fresh with the Dispatcharr M3U/EPG URLs as the Sources (in neTV settings).

Now each of those Channels populates individually as their Groups so I can control which one my users can click on:

[albertcard]

You're probably aware of this but this code block is where the group-title from the M3U is sourced from.

An example from my M3U is FX channel. The hope is to be able to list by Group or by Name (tvg-name)

#EXTINF:-1 tvg-id="129" tvg-name="FX" tvg-logo="http://192.168.0.251:9191/api/channels/logos/119/cache/" tvg-chno="129" group-title="US| ENTERTAINMENT ᴴᴰ/ᴿᴬᵂ ⁶⁰ᶠᵖˢ",FX
http://192.168.0.251:9191/proxy/ts/stream/ae73b869-958b-4231-bad2-e7f4c194f350