Tvheadend

Hey Everyone, brand new TVHeadEND user, or at least trying to be and I felt the need to post a few comments, who knows maybe answers are out there that I am not finding.

I am using TVH through Docker on an UNRAID server. I am a somewhat technical person and can fumble my away through things at times with these setups, I am not a developer nor do I try to be. Here's is what I am trying to accomplish. Note I also have Plex with a Plex pass and Xteve installed on the same server. You may be able to see where I am going here.

Backstory first. I pay for an IPTV subscription through my provider, they give me an optional M3U file that I can use as well as an EPG URL. This works just fine on my Android TV boxes through something like Perfect Player. However, I want access to this anywhere at any time on any device. Rather then have to configure the M3U and EPG on each device individually i looked into PLex's new DVR setup. This is where Xteve comes in. It emulates a setop box like the HDHomeRUn and tricks Plex into thinking it has connected to a physical box. So, I can setup and manipulate all of my channels and mappings in Xteve and then pass that through to Plex. Seems to work fine until I want to "merge" sources, there's no support for this in Xteve or Plex. So a little googling later, I find TVH.

I install TVH on my unraid server through Docker and go and add my M3U URL as an IPTV source. This works fine, it pulls all of my channels through and I can see how I can merge and map multiple channels to the same streaming channel. The problem comes in with the EPG file. There isn't a simple import EPG URL function. Yes I can see it can be done through tutorials, and running "cron" jobs (whatever those are). But it isn't simple for a none technical user. I was hoping that I could select the external XMLTV import module and just paste in my EPG file URL and set how often Id like it to update.

Also, it would be awe3some if there was an M3U and EPG output URL displayed in plain site. So I could grab them out of TVH and dump them into something like Xteve after I have done all of my merging and fixes.

This would allow me to accomplish everything I need without ever having to add anything or going in through shell etc.

Again I am a non technical user and I am using unraid. So I am limited in what I can do, but I feel like a few feature upgrades will make TVH a much more user friendly software and it can become more widely adopted by us non technical folks.

Now feel free to tell me all the ways I am wrong, cause if there is a way to do this simply I am all game. I have search tutorials and they all seem to be written by developers or very experienced users and geared towards very experienced users.