On Wednesday 29 July 2026 19:04:55 dep via tde-users wrote:

said William Morder via tde-users: | I have only recently tried streaming some online television channels | using VLC, due to my discovering a couple of YUGE playlists on github.

Can't solve your VLC issue, but I can highly recommend a proper application devoted to that purpose. It is IPTVnator:

https://github.com/4gray/iptvnator

I built two homemade television sets using it, the iptv-org playlists and some others, and Debian running on Raspberry Pi machines.

My curiosity has been piqued. Do you use an external hdmi monitor, or some such setup? I sometimes find old cabinets, and think of putting in a monitor, running from a Raspberry Pi, etc.

Also, I may have some other uses for a R Pi in the future, so now is maybe my opportunity to learn. More on that later.

Those are the only televisions I currently own. I have it, too, on my desktop machine running TDE, so I know they're happy together. (Navigate to what you want, click to watch it, double click on the program to make it full screen; esc will return you to the video with the guide on the side.) I've used both the regular application and the appimage; you might try the latter to see if you like it.) It can use VLC as its player, but I'm content with the built-in one, which is javascript.

Okay, downloaded the deb package, installed, got it up and running. It accepts my playlist just fine (and I like the fact that it takes m3u8 playlists, because they are just plain text).

Only one problem, and it's kinda a big one: NO SOUND, nor any way that I can find to enable it, increase it, etc. I did look under the hood for the controls, tried increasing volume, but nothing happens. I don't suppose this is one of those things that uses pulseaudio and won't take alsa? That's a deal breaker for me, as pulseaudio always, always, always messes up my settings, so I either purge everything to do with it, or at least disable all its evil spawn. Maybe there is some way to get it to use alsa?

Also, I tried to find some kind of preferences, settings, etc., comparable to VLC, and nothing doing.

It works, I'll give it that; whereas VLC is still crashing on me. But it's a little simpler than I would like where I want equalizers, spatializers, dolby, all that stuff.

Also I would rather not use javascript for streaming, if (for example) I should find a way to use it over a proxy. Maybe I am too picky.

Well, whatever I can get to work would be nice: vlc, this iptvnator, anything else that is recommended. Since I already know VLC (and have my settings already configured from previous installations), I would prefer to use that.

If anybody can help to get me going with VLC, or this or any other decent iptv streaming program, I would be most grateful.

Bill

On Thursday 30 July 2026 07:51:08 dep via tde-users wrote:

Well, you might be able to get Hypnotix to work. After some fiddling I was able to get it, but while it starts it won't play any channels. Also, it is probably overly simple for toyr tastes. It was all the rage in the Linux press a couple of years ago. Don't hear much about it now. https://github.com/linuxmint/hypnotix

Well, I did manage to get VLC working adequately, after all; so from a purely practical point of view, my issue is resolved.

I ought to say that I haven't used VLC it at least five years. It works well enough, but for playing actual video files from my machine, I prefer smplayer. And since I've hardly ever tried streaming videos, I haven't needed anything else. And I can't stand commercials, advertisements, nor even PBS pledge drives. If I want to watch something from YT, I use yt-dlp and download the video to my machine, the use smplayer to watch it.

When I saw all the channels available on these playlists, temptation took hold of me. But I can stop anytime I want.

After fiddling with both IPTVnator and VLC, I remembered that this had happened to me before, years ago, but that I still had my old configuration files for VLC buried away somewhere. So I made a backup of my current settings, just in case, then did some overwriting, replacing the existing configuration with the old config files ... and presto! VLC works again.

There is still the unsolved riddle of why VLC was crashing, and why it's somehow connected to gtk2 and/or tqt, or whatever. Now when I start up VLC and try to play a channel, I get a window saying that it cannot play. Then I go into settings > audio > and set my audio device:

HD audio generic, ALC257 Analog Hardware device with all software conversions

and it works again. I tried changing this to my default setting in the config, but somehow VLC or something keeps resetting it to Default, whereas I want my default to be that preferred setting. I will go into the configuration to see if I can make it permanent. But for now, it is a puzzle.

I do remember that I had the problem before, when I used VLC years ago (before 2021 or so), and it's why I switched to smplayer for playing actual video files.

Regarding my alleged "taste" for complexity: this is not so. Sometimes I want things just as simple as can be; for example, I want a text editor that is just a text editor and nothing else, so I still use an old leafpad package from Devuan/Debian Jessie, because it requires no dependencies, and still works. I don't need markup, don't do coding, etc. I just want a simple text editor.

Also, I like to keep my online and offline programs and activities separate; my own habit of a kind of sandboxing. For example, I use qmmp online for streaming radio, but use audacious for playing music files from my machine. Same thing here; I'd rather keep smplayer for my offline player, and VLC for online video streaming.

Also, both smplayer and VLC accept my TDE color scheme, whereas most others don't.

For video, however, and especially for sound, I care more about quality, so I want to be able to shape it until it looks and sounds right. I might try using IPTVnator with VLC as my player; it did give it a go last night, but I was still wrestling with VLC configuration, and it wasn't working any better like that. Or I might try Hypnotix. But for now, I got VLC working well enough, so it's no longer an issue, just a puzzle why this keeps happening.

The first couple times I run VLC, it's just fine, then it starts crashing, that gtk2-tqt issue, then I remember to overwrite the config file, then it works. Now, as I said, I get this notification window that says it cannot play my sound, and I have to go into the audio settings ... every single time.

So now it is really just a matter of how to make my VLC configuration settings permanent.

Thanks to dep and Nik for help. I would still like to get to the root of that issue, but now it is more just to satisfy my own curiosity.

Bill