Prerequisites: IPTV Account

Telly is designed to work with what we'll call Plain Old IPTV.

By that, we mean something like Iris, Vaders, Area51, Helix.

Your IPTV provider has to publish DIRECTLY an M3U file that contains the M3U plus fields and plain old http links to the streams; ideally links to TS streams:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:-1 tvg-id="btsport1.uk" tvg-name="VIP BT Sports 1 FHD" tvg-logo="http://foo.bar/30929.png" group-title="UK VIP HD/FHD",VIP BT Sports 1 FHD
http://foo.bar:83/11111111/22222222/303858.ts
#EXTINF:-1 tvg-id="btsport2.uk" tvg-name="VIP BT Sports  2 FHD" tvg-logo="http://foo.bar/30930.png" group-title="UK VIP HD/FHD",VIP BT Sports  2 FHD
http://foo.bar:83/11111111/22222222/303859.ts
#EXTINF:-1 tvg-id="btsport3.uk" tvg-name="VIP BT Sports 3 FHD" tvg-logo="http://foo.bar/30928.png" group-title="UK VIP HD/FHD",VIP BT Sports 3 FHD
http://foo.bar:83/11111111/22222222/303857.ts
#EXTINF:-1 tvg-id="btsportx3.uk" tvg-name="VIP BT Sports 3 HD" tvg-logo="http://foo.bar/30924.png" group-title="UK VIP HD/FHD",VIP BT Sports 3 HD
http://foo.bar:83/11111111/22222222/303853.ts
etc.

Often you can enable these things with flags on the IPTV URL.

Published directly

Telly is going to retrieve this M3U file and parse it. It won't follow links until it finds a valid m3u.

Recently we ran into an IPTV provider that returned an M3U containing one "channel"; the one channel's "stream" link was to the full m3u. Telly's not set up to work with such a system. If your provider does this, you'll probably have to retrieve the full M3U file yourself and pass the file to telly.

M3U_Plus fields

tvg-id
tvg-name
tvg-logo
group-title

telly uses these for filtering and EPG matching, depending on the version.

HTTP links

By default, telly works by simply redirecting Plex to the stream URL when it asks to tune a channel. These links should be plain http/https links for this to work well.

TS Streams

Plex is not compatible with m3u8 streams. Telly's FFMpeg support will transcode those streams into something that Plex accepts, but that will require some extra configuration.