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.
Cool implementation. Never occurred to me Jellyfin could serve as a streaming platform on its own! I’ll probably find the answer after sending this reply (may be helpful to others), but does it come with this functionality out of the box, or is any plug-in needed?
How probable is it that this kind of method can be patched or obfuscated further? I assume that since the HLS stream is always at the core, it’s a matter of just finding alternative ways to dig through it.
Any quirks this implementation has wrt. things like quality or additional delay? Thanks! I’d like to try out if your methods could be used to make some sort of snippet that could be sent to VLC that’s running on a TV or streaming device.
I'm curious if there is a particular technical reason you chose to make this as a separate script rather than some kind of Jellyfin plugin? I actually appreciate that you did it in this fashion (more useful for me personally), just curious if there were limitations within the Jellyfin/dotNet system.
Either way, gonna make my World Cup viewing experience this year a lot easier haha
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!
Sport streaming is the one where I don't feel bad about using unofficial services, they are reasonably priced, I can watch the broadcast of the country that I prefer (Sky UK over the German coverage for example) and I can use an app like https://www.uhfapp.com which is more polished and works better than all the official streaming apps combined.
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?
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 guess this works with Jellyfin because it supports IPTV:
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/live-tv/setup-guide...
The README mentions Plex, but AFAIK Plex DVR doesn't support M3u sources:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/225877347-live-tv-dvr/
These projects work with Plex by making IPTV m3u sources look like a local tuner:
https://github.com/vorghahn/iptv4plex
https://github.com/xteve-project/xTeVe
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.
Cool implementation. Never occurred to me Jellyfin could serve as a streaming platform on its own! I’ll probably find the answer after sending this reply (may be helpful to others), but does it come with this functionality out of the box, or is any plug-in needed?
How probable is it that this kind of method can be patched or obfuscated further? I assume that since the HLS stream is always at the core, it’s a matter of just finding alternative ways to dig through it.
Any quirks this implementation has wrt. things like quality or additional delay? Thanks! I’d like to try out if your methods could be used to make some sort of snippet that could be sent to VLC that’s running on a TV or streaming device.
I'm curious if there is a particular technical reason you chose to make this as a separate script rather than some kind of Jellyfin plugin? I actually appreciate that you did it in this fashion (more useful for me personally), just curious if there were limitations within the Jellyfin/dotNet system.
Either way, gonna make my World Cup viewing experience this year a lot easier haha
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!
[0] https://www.mlb.com/live-stream-games/subscribe/giants
Sport streaming is the one where I don't feel bad about using unofficial services, they are reasonably priced, I can watch the broadcast of the country that I prefer (Sky UK over the German coverage for example) and I can use an app like https://www.uhfapp.com which is more polished and works better than all the official streaming apps combined.
Mind if I ask where you find the playlists?
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?
any chance you'd be willing to share what the service is? I use streameast all the time but it's not reliable enough
Not OP, but I have used iptvore[dot]net previously
seconded
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.
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.