jccalhoun
danvoell
"Shazam for movies/tv shows" - We watched a Spanish Game Show while abroad this spring break. There was a team that kept winning and my family got behind them. I returned home and figured we could jump right back in and watch it remotely. After searching for hours, I'm not sure the show ever existed and might actually be a figment of my imagination even though we have photos, clips from it, and even know the name of the show. There could definitely be a need for this. Maybe shazam meets low cost pay per view for "low demand licensed content".
londons_explore
Really notable that all the youtube feeds work and load fast, whereas all the other feeds are 50/50 if they work or not, and if they do load they're slow, laggy and bad quality.
Props to the youtube engineering team I guess!
thundergolfer
One of those projects that has me wondering what I was doing instead of building this. The end result is great, and the technical details seem like they'd be interesting. TIL about Internet Protocol TV: https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv
phantomathkg
What you see in that repo is not truly true IPTV[0].
What you see in the repo is a lot of different HLS manifest[1], which in turn pointed to different questionable sources of all the OTT streams around the world.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_IPTV_Forum [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming
anjel
So the cable pirated TV to IPTV reflector streams are being re-pirated or maybe just Liberated?
esskay
I've not looked at it in a few months but fairly sure its not pirated, its just online streams of FTA channels. All the UK ones for example are are just the UK's free to air broadcasters and someones figured out the urls to the feeds they use on their websites and apps.
Lots of the US and CA ones look to be the same sort of situation. You'll find most wont work without a VPN as they are geo blocked.
pests
I have a friend who purchased some sketchy IPTV service for $100/year. Basically all the cable and premium channels from around the world. Navigating the channels are difficult as there are many duplicates or all the local channels around the country. Interesting to watch the news in different areas and sometimes a little unreliable and probably illegal but it was a TIL for me too.
esskay
I had something similar a few years ago. I ended up having to write a little script to pull out just the channels I wanted as nothing could handle the 18 thousand stream options it provided (total insanity that its bundled up into 1 file like that in the first place but seems to be the norm for dodgy IPTV providers).
Nowadays theres better tools for the job. StreamMaster* for example can handle thousands of IPTV sources and let you organise them nicely into something that can be read by Plex, Jellyfin, etc.
*Sadly recently abandoned but still available on github.
yard2010
Thanks for the rabbit hole, and making me realize I need one.
NKosmatos
There’s also Radio Garden https://radio.garden/
steelegbr
It's worth remembering that Radio Garden is now gubbed for transatlantic listening from the UK due to music licencing issues. The same problem also impacts TuneIn.
jjbinx007
"Station Unavailable
Users in the United Kingdom are restricted from tuning in to stations outside of the UK for an indefinite period due to copyright and neighboring rights related matters that require clarification.
Stations situated in the UK continue to be available.
For more information please read the statement in the 'Settings' section."
indoor47
tv.garden might witness similar issues :/
gosub100
HN brought me there over 5 years ago and I've been using it regularly ever since.
LightBug1
That was literally in my top 10 favourite websites until the UK f'd it up ... actually, I haven't tried using it with a VPN
vivzkestrel
maybe we need a podcast.garden now
dkh
Most [public] podcasts are registered in Apple's podcast registry, which is what most podcast apps with a global search/discovery feature queries, and why these apps can all turn up the same podcasts. There are also things like https://podbay.fm that put give it a more general web frontend.
I suppose that the not public podcasts could be aggregated somewhere, but I'm less of a fan of that, and there's also some technical reasons why this would be more difficult than it was to aggregate these IPTV HLS streams.
Being able to view them by country or whatever is interesting, though I think perhaps less so for podcasts than something like live news, but not a bad idea
rom16384
You may find the Podcast Index [1] project interesting, it tries to create an open index of all podcasts, and currently has 4.5M podcasts. It has a downloadable sqlite database and an API.
mcflubbins
Checks out.
Clicked on a channel in the Philippines and immediately had to sit through 5 soap related commercials, precisely what I recall from my time there.
ThatMedicIsASpy
I have a hard time recalling the last time I watched ads outside of Cyberpunk 2077 where I watched, listened and actively search for them in my first hours.
But now I want to actively want to know how ads look all around the world.
mcflubbins
I made some mix tapes a couple years ago for my wife (Filipino) with some of her favorite Filipino artists. I searched for radio bumpers and commercials from the stations we used to hear on the radio and in taxis to put in-between every couple songs as if it were a radio station it was so much fun and made her feel like home, reminded me of my years spent there too!
DaiPlusPlus
> had to sit through 5 soap related commercials
Not the skin-lightening kind, I hope? Those ads were... odd.
I spent the late-1990s in Manila, for me it was Jollibee ads, and an oddly recurrent anti-corruption PSA which, I think, made corruption look quite appealing, actually.
mcflubbins
Nope, a couple of Pride Bar commercials one for Safe Guard and a couple of laundry detergent ones.
I agree the skin lightening soap was weird for me too. Its kind of interesting how people yearn for what they don't have (pale light skin women in the west tanning, tan darker skinned women in the east lightening...)
lawgimenez
Skin lightening products are famous here for social status. It’s so fake.
airstrike
Same here. Clicked Brazil, SBT and they're showing Chaves (El Chavo del Ocho) reruns, just like they were 30 years ago...
jaqalopes
This is pretty amazing. I clicked on a Luganda-language channel in Uganda and it was a concerned-looking woman being interviewed for a news segment about a "for men" testosterone supplement. Kind of heartening to see that people everywhere are the same, for better and for worse.
vault
Thanks. I could spend hours watching distant cultures. Their colours, environment, technical equipment... I saw some people in Somalia using DJI microphones, those that in the West are mainly used by YouTubers.
I also see TVs that are normally subject to fees. I'm aware the FAQs say it's only public streams, but I fear this won't last long.
dkh
The definition of "public" in this context is not straightforward. I, too, doubt the site is long for this world, and due to its ease-of-use could possibly also draw the broadcasters' attention to all the unprotected streams they may have either not known about, or not cared about because they were only really discoverable/usable by a relatively small group of geeks
lxgr
Non-public streams wouldn’t be published without DRM, or at least not as publicly retrievable (i.e. without any authentication) M3U playlists, would they?
cadamsdotcom
Yes - for some of these you can stream if you know the URL, but you're only able to discover the URL after making an account.
dkh
I think a number of these are also public rebroadcasts piggybacking off a less-public source.
Definitely a lot of these are also [re]broadcasts from vendors, probably for a specific platform or distribution target, that people found the URLs for and that the original source isn't super aware of the details of
lxgr
If they contain some entropy, i.e. if there's path/parameter based bearer token authentication, sure.
https://iptv.example.com/720p.m3u8? I doubt you'll convince many courts of that being nonpublic.
larfus
I think its inevitable death will be from all that unrestricted pornography. That being said, these kinds of projects usually hold up for quite some time.
sepositus
My children were interested in playing with it, but this was my fear. Is there actually pornography streaming on it?
larfus
I came across erotic films in a Swiss channel, so yes. The catch is that they probably were streaming it at 3 a.m. in the night but i watched it at 7 p.m across the ocean
learningmore
The GitHub notes they were required to remove any nsfw content, or unlabeled content.
pavel_lishin
Where are the pornographic channels? You know, so I can avoid them?
AnotherGoodName
For me the site is incredibly snappy. Amazing. As in i clicked Australia, clicked ABC TV and it all loaded in milliseconds.
emmelaich
It's missing a few major channels, Seven and Nine afaics. Maybe they don't offer free iptv.
dkh
Most of these are being "offered" in a way not intended or desired by the broadcaster
genewitch
So let's link it to a site that can ddos sites, and probably has employees of media companies in it!
I'm all for sharing, but I was hoping this bit of awesome joy would not be linked here.
I wonder if OP heard about it from the NA podcast or from someone who does listen to it. It was mentioned last week Thursday to the tune of a million people, so, I guess "yes".
geostupid
This is fantastic! One of my favorite things about traveling is experiencing their media--it gives me that same feeling.
Also, as someone that studied Geography extensively, it's an excellent review in that respect as well. One can quickly jump from one place to another.
Bonus points for using a globe, and not a map!
blueflow
Go to Germany, select "KIKA" and you can see the depressed bread.
j_french
I have so many questions. Why is the bread depressed? Why is it in space? Why is the soundtrack so cool?
ternus
The bread is the mascot of the TV channel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernd_das_Brot -- an article surprisingly full of gems such as this:
> The reason for Bernd's depression was revealed in the 85th episode of the series. In his telling: "[...] A long, long time ago I fell in love with a beautiful, slim baguette. She was so unbelievably charming and funny. But unfortunately, my affection was in vain. She only had eyes for this perfect stranger, a multigrain bread. It was so devastating. [...] My heart has been a dry clump of flour ever since."
Late at night (i.e. right now in the US), KiKA plays a "late night loop" starring Bernd.
xobs
"KIKA" just shows an infinitely-looping 10-second clip of a sign swinging that translates to "Unfortunately, you can only watch the current video if you are in Germany."
singularity2001
For me Germany and Estland are confused de/ee !?
hombre_fatal
Can someone explain the economics of this?
So, there are a bunch of open http endpoints serving free video feeds and they don't care about bandwidth?
It's not like radio where you broadcast it and people passively receive the signal.
This is a great service for language practice, though. Wish it had a login + favorites system.
hunter2_
I never got into this aspect of networking, so I truly don't know what I'm talking about and wish someone will correct me, but on some level, IP does indeed have broadcast/multicast capabilities that cause the sender's egress traffic to remain independent of the number of recipients rather than being equal to the sum of recipients' ingress traffic, right? Does this only work downstream of the last router, and therefore has limited usefulness on the internet?
keeperofdakeys
> IP does indeed have broadcast/multicast capabilities that cause the sender's egress traffic to remain independent of the number of recipients rather than being equal to the sum of recipients' ingress traffic, right?
Yes multicast, however you can't do multicast over the internet. In practise the technology is mainly used in production and enterprise scenarios (broadcast, signage, hotels, stadiums, etc).
Instead big streaming platforms like netflix or twich use CDN boxes installed locally at major ISPs. Also with so much hardware acceleration on modern NICs these days, it's surprisingly easy to handle Gbits of throughput for audio/video streaming.
londons_explore
> however you can't do multicast over the internet
Some parts of the internet do actually support multicast. The BBC did IPTV via multicast to subscribers in the UK for a while.
acomjean
I think you are right. Multicast is typically udp and only available on your local net if the router is configured for it. I haven't used multicast in along so I might be wrong. I remember network updates breaking it.
al_borland
> Wish it had a login + favorites system.
The URL updates with the channel you’re watching. Your browser bookmarks could be used as your own favorites system.
hsuduebc2
I wouldn't they don't care. It just wasn't problem for them. But basically yes. I blindly checked few of the TV's listed for my country and every one of them had live stream on Google publicly available somewhere.
But is this really a concern for them? If they are making money from advertisement this just add them justification for higher price of an ad.
dkh
They aren't making money from this, but they are likely operating at a scale where they either don't notice if 1000 nerds on the internet are piggybacking their feeds, or don't care all that much.
It is not likely useful to them in negotiating ad rates, at least not with how advertising is usually bought/sold, because the broadcaster has almost no information (if any) about anyone watching these streams, including if it's even a person. It's possible they could fold it into a more general ad package that places a lot of weight on total view/viewers numbers, but that is a lot less common these days, and when it is done, the rates tend to be much lower
hsuduebc2
Yea I meant it is an argument they can use but not a good metric at all. I agree that mostly they just do not care. This tool only means that they'll get more international views from curious people but in the end it means nothing.
andreresende
[dead]
ctm92
The name is ironic, as there is a german TV show called Fernsehgarten (basically television garden). It's broadcasted live every sunday morning during summer season on ZDF, basically it's a outdoor studio with music and other things around a topic every week.
Mostly targeted to elderly people, but funny to watch every once in a while. You can even go there in person for quite cheap
whoisstan
The name is probably inspired by TV Garden from Nam June Paik from the 70s
Pretty fun. Reminds me of the 90s when my parents had a big satellite dish and I would spend time going from satellite to satellite seeing what was being broadcast in the clear. There's something about discovering something weird that you never knew existed. There are some b-movie channels on roku that i love just because I never know what kind of weird movie they will play
I do wish there was some kind of Shazam for movies/tv shows because there are times when I flip on one of those in the middle of a movie, get into it, and then have the hardest time trying to find the name of it.