SOLVED: Live IPTV Failure - Playback failed due to a fatal player error

[quecup]

I'm a new Jellyfin user. Fresh install as a docker on a Synology NAS. I followed the official install guide.

I cannot get M3U Tuner Live TV working. When I click on a channel, I get a popup error message: Playback Error - Playback failed due to a fatal player error.

   

I'm following the official Jellyfin Live TV guide, with the provided M3U8 "samples to use to test connectivity". I've also tried alternative M3U8's, but get the same error.


  jellyfin docker - log of iptv player failure.txt (Size: 31.75 KB / Downloads: 106)

Log attached.

Any idea how to fix this?

[gnattu]

> http://37.58.85.156/rlo001/ngrp:rlo001.s...ylist.m3u8: Connection timed out

Jellyfin cannot even connect to your LiveTV server.

[quecup]

I'll investigate that and see what I can find.

I shouldn't have anything blocking the NAS.

Synology NAS (running Jellyfin docker) -> OpenWRT Router -> Modem

All ethernet connected. Router has Adblock, but I've disabled it while setting things up. There's no VPN or proxying on any of those devices. I've changed the DNS to 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8

It seems weird that it's blocked. Other IPTV services I've tried also fail on Jellyfin. I *can* receive IPTV on other devices on a nVidia Shield that's also on my network. That's unusual.

Jellyfin has no issues connecting to Youtube for trailers or to TVDB etc for artwork and metadata info.

Will report back with more info.

[quecup]

I solved this problem.

There are at least two problems here. First, I'm using M3U8 files from this site: {Providing links to sources is prohibited - TDP} - Jellyfin is not compatible with the M3U8 files that are configured for KODI. Nor the ones for TvHeadend. I have to go to the "raw" M3U8 files for it to start working.

"Raw" M3U8 is not ideal, because unlike the KODI and TvH files, "They don't pipe any streams and don't add any extra headers etc. Therefore, a lot of streams may not work" according to the site.

What Jellyfin actually has trouble with is processing the user-agent that is appended to every stream URL in the KODI and TvH M3U8s. If I manually strip just the user-agent string, then the KODI files (the only one I tried this with) work properly in Jellyfin, including headers, etc.

The user-agent in the non-RAW M3U8s has some escape characters, but otherwise looks like: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.102 Safari/537.36&seekable=0&referer=

KODI m3u8

Code:

#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="mjh-7two-per" tvg-id="mjh-7two-per" tvg-logo="https://i.mjh.nz/.images/7two-per.png" tvg-chno="72" group-title="Perth" , 7two
https://<url redacted>/.r/7two-per.m3u8|user-agent=Mozilla/5.0%20%28Windows%20NT%2010.0%3B%20Win64%3B%20x64%29%20AppleWebKit/537.36%20%28KHTML%2C%20like%20Gecko%29%20Chrome/98.0.4758.102%20Safari/537.36&seekable=0&referer=%20

TVHeadend m3u8

Code:

#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="mjh-7two-per" tvg-id="mjh-7two-per" tvg-logo="https://i.mjh.nz/.images/7two-per.png" tvg-chno="72" group-title="Perth" , 7two
pipe://ffmpeg -loglevel fatal -probesize 10M -analyzeduration 0 -fpsprobesize 0 -headers user-agent:\ Mozilla/5.0\ (Windows\ NT\ 10.0;\ Win64;\ x64)\ AppleWebKit/537.36\ (KHTML,\ like\ Gecko)\ Chrome/98.0.4758.102\ Safari/537.36\r\nseekable:\ 0\r\nreferer:\ \ \r\n -i https://<url redacted>/.r/7two-per.m3u8 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -metadata service_name=mjh-7two-per -f mpegts pipe:1

RAW m3u8

Code:

#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="mjh-7two-per" tvg-id="mjh-7two-per" tvg-logo="https://i.mjh.nz/.images/7two-per.png" tvg-chno="72" group-title="Perth" , 7two
https://<url redacted>/.r/7two-per.m3u8

tl;dr: Jellyfin won't play channels from certain M3U8 files with user-agents already attached to IPTV stream URLs.

For now, I'm making do with the RAW M3U8 files that are available.

The other problem is that the test IPTV M3U8 file that's in the Jellyfin Live TV Setup Guide only has links to dead streams.

note
Here is a list of legal samples to use to test connectivity.
LegalStream Live News Playlist

When you're troubleshooting, it doesn't help to have the example Test M3U8 file that you're comparing to, also failing with the exact same error message. It wasn't until I was comparing the logs that I noticed that they were failing differently. The error message displayed in Jellyfin is quite obtuse and unhelpful, or else I may have figured this out a week earlier.

I've lost count of the number of times I've reinstalled Jellyfin in a NAS docker and on Win desktop this week trying to figure out why IPTV was broken for me on both machines with Jellyfin, but not on my IPTV program with the same KODI M3U8.