alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I pipe free sports streams into Jellyfin – no ads, just HLS
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This works with Jellyfin because it supports m3u:
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/live-tv/setup-guide...
Channels DVR also supports m3u:
https://getchannels.com/docs/channels-dvr-server/how-to/cust...
The README mentions Plex and Emby, but those don't support m3u, so you need to use a proxy which makes an m3u source appear like a local tuner such as:
https://github.com/Threadfin/Threadfin
I love it. I’m willing to pay for streaming sports services, to a point, but all of them are freaking insane. For example, my wife and I like watching baseball. So let’s do the right thing and pay for it, right? LOL, as if that were possible. For $120[0] we can watch the Giants games, or for $220, all games… but subject to blackout. For $120, we can’t actually watch home games. We’d have to pay for a separate streaming service for those.
It’s similar for NFL, and I assume NHL and NBA, too. I’d pay to watch the stuff I watch if it were possible, but it’s not!
Sports should be free to watch, the product itself is covered in ads already
Very cool. I’ve used a paid service for years now that gets me all sorts of sports and channels very reliably, I would assume they’re doing something similar to make this work. Might try this though with my home server setup.
Think it could be ran from within a docker container so I could add it to an existing docker compose media server setup?
Since this works on the raw data streams from the official distributor, this is legal, correct?
I totally needed something like this. Looks very good.
[dead]
It's a cool hack...but also a bit unethical as the reason they are free is that there's ads. I almost feel it's more ethical to sign up for a paid pirated IPTV service and then use that, with the benefit of that being more stable and probably with higher quality.
I self-host Jellyfin on my homelab and got frustrated opening a laptop every time there was a football match just to deal with popup-infested streaming sites. The actual video underneath is just a standard HLS stream, but getting it into Jellyfin turned out to be harder than expected.
Three problems: (1) the m3u8 URL is buried behind iframes and obfuscated JS, (2) tokens expire every few hours, and (3) the upstream server checks User-Agent and Referer headers on both the playlist and .ts segments — Jellyfin doesn't send these, so you get 403.
I ended up writing three scripts:
- detect-headers.sh: give it a page URL, it follows the iframe chain, extracts the m3u8, then brute-forces header combinations on both .m3u8 and .ts requests. Tells you exactly what the stream needs.
- hls-proxy.py: single-file Python reverse proxy (stdlib only, zero pip dependencies). Injects the required headers and rewrites the m3u8 so segment requests also go through the proxy.
- refresh-m3u.sh: extracts fresh URLs before tokens expire, outputs a Jellyfin-ready M3U with logos and channel groups. Runs on a systemd timer.
~200 lines of Python, ~100 lines of bash. The proxy is the interesting part technically — it has to handle relative and absolute segment URLs, rewrite URI= in EXT tags (for encryption keys), and add CORS headers since Jellyfin's web client makes cross-origin requests.
Happy to answer questions about the approach or implementation.