Locast Alternatives?

[tesla1886]

With Locast now shut down, apparently permanently, are there any alternatives that provide similar services and can be used through NPVR?

[Jean0987654321]

None really. Hopefully, somebody can make one for LocalBTV. That seems to be a spiritual successor to Locast...

[mvallevand]

For LocalBTV currently you don't even need an extra the URL's are open, but the quality is poor, and no major networks so it is hardly an alternative.

Martin

[Jean0987654321]

They have PBS and BeIN Xtra tho. Theres also some hidden gems in some markets that pop up there.

Hopefully, someone opens up shop for a script at least to grab a playlist file with that stuff...

[mvallevand]

There are already m3u URL lists for many PBS stations in the US and as I noted low quality localBTN feeds too. I don't offer an IPTV URL find "service" but user can search for them themselves. As an example https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv/tree/master/channels is a good source of URL's around the world, many are geo-locked, and I don't guarantee their stability or recommend their use in a PVR.

Martin

[sgilani]

LocalBTV seems to have some major networks now in 720p / 1080p too.

See this thread for some background:

https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv/discussions/5296

[mvallevand]

There hasn't been any posts about these. Would it help if I wrote a utility that made the m3u file easier to auto map Schedules Direct?

Martin

[markosjal]

I know nothing about locast but I am using one free service and one very cheap service

1) Very Cheap ( I used their cheapest tier and got 720p with this method both before and after my upgrade to the most expensive plan) FrndlyTV https://try.frndlytv.com/ using the script for FrndlyTV for Channels https://github.com/matthuisman/frndlytv-for-channels (see note below)

2) I found USTVGO http://ustvgo.tv , and was using Cabernetwork https://cabernetwork.github.io/ but it kept having data corruption. Looking at the code I see it referenced this script: https://github.com/benmoose39/ustvgo_to_m3u which I am now trying to transition to but came to this forum to see if there is a solution to a specific problem and if anyone has any idea how to convert this guide data https://ustvgo.tv/tvguide/national.json in json to xml.

Cabernet has been very problematic for me and no luck getting it to do what it claims to do with PlutoTV, not even after installin TVHeadend from source to get the latest version. Basicly PlutoTV is broken and the only fix needs to come from PlutoTV . Even worse try watching it on a comcast cable box!


Just wanted to also add on that international m3u list that someone pointed out here are some channel recommendations that you might otherwise overlook, as I have some of these already that I use too.

Australia List (I do not care what country its all about content and we can time shift!)
SBS, SBS Viceland, and SBS world movies. Have great TV Shows and great movies. In fact there you can watch Orville and some other great shows that you only get on paid services like Hulu. Remember the deal for distribution in Australia is independent of the USA or Canada distribution. In fact my recording of Orville fires off here in about 1 hour from now, even though this week I did watch it on Hulu.

Note about FrndlyTV for channels script. The channel list works fine in Next PVR, but the guide data will not go directly into NextPVR so I use a work-around. I have a Cron job that does a wget every several hours to get guide data from the frndlytv for Channels script . That script creates its own web server on port 8182 but on that same machine , a RaspberryPi that runs that script and NextPVR, I also run an Apache Web server already so after using Wget to get the guide data it is then written to a directory in the apache web server. This is because NextPVR it seems does not wait for the very slow script that has to get and convert data. wget will happily wait, then when nextPVR wants it it is ready in a flash on the Apache Web server without delay. It took me a while to figure out it was not the formatting of the guide data it was in fact the slow speed that NextPVR would not wait for.

[markosjal]

I think it is Xumo that has some local TV Channels , I think KOMO TV is there and I also Have KIRO TV from somewhere maybe one of those github lists. They are both from Seattle. So that is not bad . WOuld be nice for someone to work on the PBS lists that work on Kodi and there are publicly available lists for PBS affiliates on Kodi but the USLs are all Kodi specific with the PBS addon.