FastChannels - FAST Channels aggregator/manager

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#2435

FastChannels 5.0.0 — What's New

Headline: TV Everywhere (TVE) support BETA

FastChannels can now pull cable/satellite-authenticated channels using your TV provider login (Adobe Pass / "TV Everywhere"), the same tech Xfinity/Cox/etc. use to let you watch cable channels in their own apps. Sign in once with your provider and it cascades across all the networks below automatically.

I know CDVR handles this currently, but with more and more moving to DRM, I decided to add support so when the inevitable DRM switch gets thrown, there's a backup. The goal was to at least have a DRM-Bridge option for users. If CDVR TVE works for you currently, I would leave it there inside CDVR. This is currently only tested with Cox authentication, but I'm open to adding more support - but would need users to provide credentials to me. DM me if interested.

New channels/sources:

  • A+E Networks TVE — History, A&E, Lifetime, FYI
  • AMC Networks TVE — AMC, BBC America, IFC, WE tv
  • Discovery TVE — Discovery-family TVE channels
  • FOX TVE — Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Weather, FS1, FS2, FOX, Big Ten Network, FOX Deportes, FOX Soccer Plus
  • FOX One TVE — FOX's direct streaming product (own sign-in, unlocks paid FOX Sports channels)
  • NBCUniversal TVE — local NBC, NBC News NOW, NBC Sports Now, Bravo (+ Vault), Real Housewives Vault, Telemundo digital feeds, NBC Universo, NECN
  • Warner Bros. Discovery TVE — TBS, TNT, truTV
  • PBS (non-TVE) — clear local PBS stations, plus an opt-in DRM-bridge mode for PBS/PBS KIDS stations that need it

All of these are off by default — head to Settings → TV Everywhere to sign in and turn them on. Most share one sign-in; a couple (FOX One, PBS DRM) are configured separately.

Playback fixes

  • Fixed a DirecTV PrismCast "Failed to start stream" bug some users hit
  • Fixed Roku streams occasionally getting stuck with no audio/video (license error) for up to 5 hours after a bad response
  • Philo streams stay closer to true live now, with smoother recovery from buffering
  • Restored in the guide data — if your DVR (e.g. Channels DVR) was losing track of recording series and falling back to matching by title, this fixes it

Channel numbers

  • Locking a channel number now blocks conflicts instead of silently letting two channels share one
  • Red "conflict" numbers now explain what's wrong on hover
  • New "Lock All" button on the Feeds page to pin your current numbering in one click

Smaller fixes

  • Fixed some Xumo radio channels and Plex sports/news channels getting mislabeled as "Movie"
  • C-SPAN's overflow/event channels have clearer names and more accurate live guide data
  • Assorted guide-data (tvtv/Gracenote) reliability fixes for channels that weren't getting matched before
  • Settings & Sources page reorganized for easier navigation
  • Added experimental support for MPEG-TS output for DRM-Bridge channels (as opposed to HLS).
  • Added experimental support for tvc-stream-timestamps="rewrite" to generated M3U entries for Channels DVR. This may help recordings with bad durations or timestamp corruption, but can affect in-progress playback on some streams.
6 Likes
#2436

Excuse the simple question from a novice. Is there an easy eay or script to ipdate fastchannels? My last update caused a little chaos, and restore worked ok, ut assimed there may be an easy few lines to update the virtual image on docker and restart.

I love fastchannels. Solved my BBC News guide issues and more. I did one stupid thing to de-dupe channels once which screwed up my CDR channel guide lists so readded dupes for sone channels.

This shows my novice lack of a abilities.

#2437

How did you deploy it? I deploy/update through Portainer and it's easy.

1 Like
#2438

If you have FastChannels in docker, you can install Watchtower. You run it when needed from inside docker and it will update for you (and update everything else too).

1 Like
#2439

Looking forward to doing the update tonight. I was running into an issue yesterday where lip sync was way off on Frndly channels. The longer a show played, the worse it got. I haven't tried troubleshooting; it's the first time I've seen an issue. I was also doing a bunch of work on the network infrastructure yesterday and I haven't verified all my interfaces yet.

IMG_0763

#2440

I mentioned this interesting project here and how it works with FastChannels:

The developer @AnalogTV chimed in, and has now added FastChanels and Plex integration to the mix!

https://reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/1vh3hxj/_/p2rq625/?context=1

#2441

Please read this to understand the various ways to go about upgrading Dockers.

#2442

Checking if YTTV is intended to be added. I don't see if in the list of providers under the new version?

#2443

When doing Sign in to all, this kept happening:

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I tried a single one in the A&E family, and it was the same result. So I attempted a Warner one, and it happened again. All I'm seeing in the logs is stuff like this:

2026-08-10 17:13:04,419 INFO app.routes.tasks: Enqueued MVPD browser login for requestor_id=AETV mso_id=Cox cascade=False

And on a subsequent attempt, this happened:

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After a bit, it started playing like it was a VNC session and went to here:

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Then, I restarted the whole Container and tried FOX One. That took a long while (~6 minutes), but it did eventually authenticate. As such, I tried Discovery and it got as far as here:

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The logs are showing hundreds of GET attempts in a row, followed by dozens of POST ones. Pretty much the same thing happened with AMC.

FYI, I have also been using the TEST button and getting green check mark verification.

Out of time on this one today, can look at some more tomorrow...

1 Like
#2444

With the PBS stations, the API will actually give you the name for what the local substations are:

image

With that, you'll need to do some parsing because obviously a lot of things are "Create", as well as World, FNX, and NHK World, so you are getting repeats of the same feed (they all come from the same place, so there is no differences between them).

Also, I mentioned this to you before, but I already have the Gracenote mapping for all the PBS stations:

This is another way you can determine repeats because the gracenote_id value is the same for all of those clean stations.

image

The gracenote_id_natural is what it is for the OTA in that market, but that is not what comes through on the stream and shouldn't be used.

#2445

Fiddle sticks.

I will caution everyone- this was a hack and a half. It’ll time me some time to iron this out.

1 Like
#2446

For whatever reason, the Mask Singer station is coming in as "FOX Movies" and the logo is... something...

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Also, it is auto-assigned a Gracenote ID of "TBD", which would be a bit of trouble in Channels. AFAIK, no one has been able to figure out a Gracenote ID for it, so it should probably drop.

#2447

The provider option is missing YouTubeTV. Not too sure why

#2448

As mentioned, only one supported initially is Cox. I know it's riddled with bugs so hoping someone had Cox to test and once it's ironed out, I'll work on adding more providers.

Bare with me!

3 Likes
#2449

Nice update!!!! Got question on FuboTV, a few of my channels are now DRM, are you able to run those through PrismCast?
Also, I noticed that in SlingTV using PrismCast, Vix Deportes 21, 22, 23 has wrong link. stream URL for 21 should be Stream Live TV Now | Get Started
vix 22 is Stream Live TV Now | Get Started
vix 23 is Stream Live TV Now | Get Started
Also on sling, I subscribe to VIX+ and the audit and scraper does not pick those channels up. I'm currently running them through PrismCast and not through FastChannels-PrismCast.
Again, very nice update with the TVE option!!!

#2450

yea that channel sucks.. good call out. it appears to be a rotating event channel. i'm going to exclude for now until i sort it out.

also, pls try 5.0.2 tomorrow. i removed the cascading sign in for all TVE sources and left it to one at a time until it's stable. seems to work much better now. hang in there, we'll get this dialed in for Cox

appreicate the many responses offering to help-- once i get Cox dialed in, i think adding other cable providers will go a lot smoother.

#2451

The Masked Singer channel at Fox One plays back-back previously aired episodes without commercials. I get the channel using EPlusTV. Each episode is on average 44 minutes ESPN+ & FOX Sports with Custom Channels via EPlusTV - #3136 by chDVRuser

#2452

Here's the channel logo for The Masked Singer channel
https://tmsimg.fancybits.co/assets/GNLZZGG0027SNRC.png?w=360&h=270

#2453

Here is a script someone here sent me. I am docker-illiterate, don't know how to use Compose, and tried, but gave up on, Portainer. This works for me (though I always do a backup within the app just to be sure because the first time I did this it installed a completely new container and all of my customizations were in the Portainer container. IIRC I found a way to use the restore file and get things back the way I wanted them (this was before the app itself made restorations much easier). Anyway, this is what I currently use when I want to run an update. It lives in a batch file.

docker container stop --timeout 30 fastchannels
docker container rm fastchannels
docker image rm ghcr.io/kineticman/fastchannels
docker run -d --name fastchannels --restart unless-stopped -p 5523:5523 -v fastchannels_data:/data ghcr.io/kineticman/fastchannels:latest
#2454

Never heard of Watchtower - is there a link somewhere? I searched for it within Docker and it came up with too many hits.