Unfortunately I've noticed this problem has returned, there's unicode characters appearing again. And it's intermittent, sometimes the emoji appear properly, although I can't discern a pattern of when or why. No big deal, not worth spending time debugging. I still recognize these channels by their thumbnails. But just wanted to share in case others find similar issues with emojis in their shows' descriptions in the future.
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20 posts were merged into an existing topic: Playlists for YouTube Live channels using the Kister Method
@jkister
Just wanted to say Thanks again for creating and sharing this.
I've been using this and hlstube side by side for four months and when hlstube fails (couple times/month), your method always continues working on the same feed.
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Thanks- the likes on this thread are good enough 
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Finally got a chance to play with this over the weekend. Very cool stuff!
Because I’m notoriously typo prone, I decided to create an iOS Shortcut that will transform a YouTube Live link into a Kister url and copies it to the Clipboard.
It’s working great for just a basic url without specifying channel or other parameters but I’m thinking of adding that capability. It also occurs to me that that this would probably be possible with a Google Sheet with some formulas (Replace/Substitute) & you could have drop-downs to choose some of the parameters.
Is there a way to string multiple together using @UserName like you can with video ID. I tried adding the & symbol between two. It didnt quiet work out. The example URL i was trying is https://kister.net/mpl/yt2m3u8?v=@SuperSimpleSongs&@msrachel . Or is linking to the @UserName can I only do 1 per source? Or to get multiples going do I need to make it a m3u file.
I figured I would try to get clarification before i spend a lot of time.
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Should work if you Add a v= after that & sign and before the second username
https://kister.net/mpl/yt2m3u8?v=@SuperSimpleSongs&v=@msrachel
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Awesome. Ill try making some playlist tonight.
Hmm, to test this out, I just added this channel, and it's working for me. Not sure why it isn't working for you. Anyone else?
What is "429 Too many requests" error I am getting?
Simply had to turn off vpn. Working fine now.
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@jkister Want to thank you again for creating this.
I use it 15+ times/week and it works flawlessly.
Just gave hlstube the boot as it has become unreliable lately with 403 Forbidden errors on the same source that your method works perfectly on.
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Should this livestream work? It has some special ascii characters in the title. Maybe it is puking on that. Also the description is super long. The error is Could not fetch playlist: kister.net...
LIVE Plane Spotting at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) - YouTube
That's not a livestream anymore, it's a recording. The Kister Method only works with YouTube live videos.
Thanks for bringing this up. I've been having HLSTube issues for weeks and hadn't thought much about it, but setting up the Kister Method seems to have alleviated all of that!
That said, one of thing I liked with the HLSTube method was naming the stations and giving them custom logos. Is there any way to do that with the Kister method?
Example Comparing HLSTube vs. Kister Stations
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hmm. not yet. it would get messy passing in data like that though because the extra data would have to be URL encoded. e.g spaces would have to be %20 and slashes %2F
so instead of grabbing the logo from the youtube stream, you'd want to specify a logo & tv-guide name on the URL like:
https://kister.net/mpl/yt2m3u8?v=@ai-peter,tvg-name=Family%20 Guy,logo=wherever.com%2Fyourimage.jpg
?
EDIT: edited just about everything
Yeah, something like that could work, except I think we'd also need to be able to do the logos like tvg-logo=%2Fdvr%2Fuploads%2F107%2Fcontent to use the uploaded images (not sure if we'd have to have the double quotes around that or not).
If you feel like going more/less crazy, the ability to add any valid m3u tag as a comma separated list could work just fine, too. For instance, instead of the custom variable ph=3600, just let users add tvc-guide-placeholders=3600.
ok so that's hooked in. not too well tested so if LMK if anyone who's been using this for a while has sudden weird issues with the guide.
I changed the channel names, so they're not the crazy yt2m3u8-8KGXSjtS5pk on the guide screen -- it now detects it from youtube.
it also allows much tags to be specified as comma-separated parameters that will override default behavior:
channel-id
channel-number
tvg-logo
tvg-name
tvc-guide-title
tvc-guide-description
tvc-guide-art
tvc-guide-tags
tvc-guide-genres
tvc-guide-categories
tvc-guide-placeholders
tvc-guide-stationid
each one also has a two or thee letter alias (so the url doesnt have to get too long). they're predictable, like channel-id = ci, channel-number = cn, tvc-guide-genres = tgg.
there's also a special logos tag that will set both tvg-logo and tvc-guide-art to the same value.
remember these parameters need to be url encoded. He has a URL Encoding Functions thing where you can paste a regular string and it gives you back the encoded.
you can get unexpected results duplicating channel-number and channel-id. don't do that.
https://kister.net/mpl/yt2m3u8?v=rxBBRLWF0mM,tn=My%20own%20guide%20name,tgl=https%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2Fzw9bd6mp
4 Likes
Cool, where would that be? On the TV client or in the web admin? I've already seen proper channel names on AppleTV in the guide. But where I'd really like to see them is in the web admin, in the Source channel listing:
and also in the Channel Collections page:
I also just refreshed the M3U, but don't see any changes. Am I looking in the wrong place?