Kepuli-TV

Plays your own Xtream Codes IPTV account in the browser, with a programme guide and MKV subtitles.

Kepuli-TV plays the contents of your own Xtream Codes IPTV account straight in Chrome. No separate application and no media server: you give the server address and your credentials, and your live channels, movies and series appear in the sidebar. PLEASE NOTE: The extension contains, distributes and relays no content, and it comes with no provider. You need your own Xtream Codes IPTV account, which you have obtained yourself. Kepuli-TV is a player and nothing else, and it is intended solely for viewing content you have the right to view. You are responsible for ensuring that the service you use is lawful in your own country. MATROSKA ON THE FLY Chrome will not open a Matroska file, even when the picture inside it would be fine. Kepuli-TV unpacks the MKV container on the fly into a form the built-in video element accepts. The picture is neither decoded nor re-encoded, so the work is light and seeking behaves normally. The audio decides more often than the container: more than half of the episodes carry a surround-sound track that the browser cannot decode. Those tracks are decoded on the spot and encoded back with the browser's own encoder: AAC, or Opus where the browser has no AAC encoder. Measured on a sample of 23,628 episodes: without this, 44.6% would work; with it, 93.7%. SUBTITLES Subtitle tracks are picked up during the unpacking and drawn over the picture by the player, in full-screen mode too. Below the picture there is a language selector in alphabetical order, and beside it an Aa button that sets how the text looks against what is on screen rather than against a preview in a dialog. Five looks - shadow, outline, yellow, box and high contrast - and the size in pixels from a slider. The chosen language is remembered and carries over to the next episode. Text formats such as SRT show. Bitmap formats are images and cannot be shown. FAST EVEN WITH ENORMOUS CATALOGUES A typical catalogue is tens of megabytes and hundreds of thousands of lines. Kepuli-TV does not load it in one go. It fetches only what you are browsing at the time: the categories when the connection opens, a country's channels only when you click it, the whole catalogue only if you search it. One typically opens within a second or two. Everything loaded once stays in a local cache, so the next open is instant. The cache can be cleared from the settings. Nothing waits behind a dialog while it arrives. A fetch reports itself in a strip above the rows it is filling, with what it is loading and a way to stop it, and what is playing carries on while it runs. CATEGORIES IN A SENSIBLE SHAPE Providers pack two levels into a single name, such as "Sweden - Sport". They are split, which condenses hundreds of muddled categories into dozens of countries in the sidebar and moves the subjects into topic buttons along the top. Everything is sorted alphabetically, numbers as numbers included: Rocky 2 comes before Rocky 10. The sidebar filter matches the second level too: with the word "sport" you find the places that have a sports category even when their name lacks the word. Searching folds the marks off a name and takes the words in whatever order they were typed, because a catalogue written in a dozen languages is read on a single keyboard: elain finds Elainkanava spelled with its umlaut, and a name found with its words the wrong way round still ranks below one that reads as it was typed. PROGRAMME GUIDE AND ARCHIVE The guide gives the grid the height of the window: channels as rows, time on the horizontal axis and a moving now line, with what is selected and the video itself in a column beside it rather than in a band across the top. On a 1024-by-700 window that is nine rows where a band left four. The timeline runs from two days back to five days forward, and where the provider keeps an archive, a past programme can be started straight from the guide. FEATURES • What is on air, with a progress bar, on every row • A full-window programme guide, with catch-up where an archive exists • Matroska and its subtitles without an external player • Series by season, with cover art and episode descriptions; movies with their plot and rating • Files that cannot be shown are marked before you click, and their address can be handed to a desktop application with the resume position • Casting to a Chromecast • Resume positions remembered for everything on demand • Favourites and viewing history as tabs of their own, and a favourite can be a whole section • Automatic reconnection when a live stream drops, and where the account itself is the reason a stream will not come - the subscription run out, or every connection it allows already in use - the message says so • Technical details over the video, and the subscription's own details under Account & data • Every key listed under Help, or behind the ? key • The interface in English and Finnish, opening in whichever the browser asks for LIVE AND ON DEMAND Live channels arrive as a transport stream and, when needed, as HLS. Automatic mode tries the transport stream first for its lower latency and falls back to HLS if it does not start. On-demand files in the common containers open, MKV included. Left out are the AVI container and a couple of video codecs with no decoder on board. Those files are marked before you click, and their address goes to a desktop player or to the clipboard with a single button. WITHIN REACH The keyboard reaches everything: a single tab stop for each of the three places that hold a cursor of their own, the arrows inside them, and a key for whatever the mouse can do. Text sizes follow the setting in your browser rather than ignoring it, and the rows grow with them. A system asking for more contrast is answered. Below 760 pixels of width the sidebar becomes a menu at the top of the list, which is what a window on half a screen - or a screen at 200 per cent - actually has. PRIVACY AND PERMISSIONS • All data stays on your own machine. The extension sends your details nowhere: network requests go only to your own server. The exception is logos and cover art, which are fetched from wherever your provider points. • No tracking, no analytics, no advertising, no user accounts. • Installation asks for access to no site at all. Chrome asks for the permission only when you enter your own server address, and only for that one. • There are no content scripts: the extension does not touch the pages you browse. • Credentials are stored locally on this machine.