Pluto Zombie Streams

I use Matt Huisman’s site https://i.mjh.nz/ to pull in most of my m3us for Pluto, Plex and Stirr. About a month ago I decided to run the M3U files through m3u4u.com to filter, sort and track changes. I didn’t like how little data was provided in Channels web UI for channels that get removed from M3U files. Anyways M3u4u.com solved that for me.

Within M3u4u.com I decided to copy channels over and create a new M3U group of the channels I was interested in (since there are so many repeats from service to service). The benefit of this copy, I have learned, is that the copy doesn’t update when the M3U file updates. While that means new channels are not added right away, channels are also not deleted right away.

This brings me to the fun part. I realized that certain channels got removed from the latest M3U update but my copied versions still held an active url link, as they don’t update.

I’m not sure how long they may remain active but they have active guide data as well. Had I just plugged the M3U directly into channels I would have lost channels that as of tonight I still have access to. This all may be common knowledge to some here but I stumbled upon it so I thought I’d share.

Donating a few bucks to m3u4u gets you quite a few M3U playlist managers, you start with 2 for free, I now have all of my M3Us filtering through m3u4u first and then entering channels.