LiveWire

LiveWire is an IPTV player for Android TV, Google TV and Fire TV. You bring your own Xtream Codes or M3U provider. There's no account and no LiveWire server. The app talks to your provider directly, and your login is stored only on the device.

Guide	Player options
Sports	Settings

Features

• Home. A hero band shows what's on the focused channel now and next, with rails of channels grouped by your provider's categories.
• Guide. A programme grid with a red now-line. You can filter it by category or keyword, and it keeps your place when you come back from a channel. Above the grid, a details band describes the focused programme, and after 2 seconds it also plays that channel muted. A downloaded guide is reused for up to 3 hours, so reopening the Guide in that time doesn't download it again.
• Player. Up and Down change channel. Left opens the channel list, and Right opens Options: favourite, audio track, subtitles, picture mode (fit, fill, zoom), reload and stream info.
• Catch-up and time shift. Some providers keep a recording of each channel for a few days (an archive). On those channels:
  • In the Guide, scroll left to go back up to 2 days. Programmes you can still play are marked ⟲. OK on one of them plays it from the start. OK on the programme airing now asks whether to watch live or start it over. The remote's rewind and fast-forward keys, or Page Up and Page Down, jump the Guide by 3 hours.
  • In the player, OK pauses live TV, and OK again carries on from where you paused, behind live. Up goes back to live. To seek, press Down to select the progress bar; while it's selected, Left and Right move back and forward instead of opening the panels. The rewind and fast-forward keys seek too.
  • On a channel without an archive, OK pauses and plays as before, and a one-time message says the channel can't rewind.
• Favourites. To add one, hold OK on a channel in Home, the Guide or Search and choose Favourite, or use the Favourite row in the player's Options. Favourites appear as a rail at the top of Home, a ★ Favourites filter in the Guide and a group at the top of the player's channel list. If you start watching from a favourite, Up and Down in the player move through your favourites only. Reorder or remove them under Settings → Favourites. They're saved separately for each provider, on the device only.
• Search. Results are grouped into channels, programmes that are on now or later, and games. When the field is empty it shows your recent searches and the channels you watched last.
• Sports. Scores and schedules from ESPN for the NFL, college football, the NBA, men's college basketball, MLB, the NHL and the Premier League. Choosing a game opens a picker listing your channels whose names match the game's network or teams, ranked by how closely they match and checked against your guide.
• Providers. Add more than one Xtream or M3U provider and switch between them. Placeholder rows that some providers use as category headers (##### NEWS #####) are hidden.
• Settings. Stream format (MPEG-TS or HLS), guide window, channel preview, now-playing text on Home cards, favourites, and About with Check for updates.
• Updates. LiveWire checks GitHub for a new release once a day and offers to install it. It installs an update only if the file's checksum matches the release and it's signed with the same key as the installed app.

Everything works with a TV remote's D-pad. On phones and touch TVs, taps work too.

Install

LiveWire isn't in the Play Store or the Amazon Appstore. Download the APK from the latest release and sideload it.

1. Allow installs from unknown sources for the app you'll install with. Menu names vary by device.
   • Fire TV: Settings → My Fire TV → Developer options → Install unknown apps. If Developer options is hidden, open Settings → My Fire TV → About and select the device name seven times.
   • Google TV / Android TV: Settings → Apps → Security & restrictions → Unknown sources, then allow the app you'll use to install LiveWire (for example Downloader or your file manager).
2. Install the APK in one of these ways:
   • Downloader app (Fire TV and Google TV), free from the Amazon Appstore or Google Play: enter https://git.namillis.me/namillis/LiveWireTV/releases/latest, scroll to Assets, and select the livewire-<version>.apk link.
   • adb from a computer on the same network. Turn on network or ADB debugging in Developer options, and find the TV's IP address under its network settings:

     adb connect <tv-ip>:5555
     adb install -r livewire-<version>.apk
     

   • A file manager, from a USB drive or network share.
3. Updating: LiveWire checks GitHub for a new release once a day and offers to install it from Home. You can also check under Settings → About → Check for updates. The first time, Android asks you to allow LiveWire to install apps. To update by hand, install the new APK over the old one. Every release is signed with the same key, so your providers and settings are kept.

Setup

On first launch a short setup walks you through adding a provider: choose Xtream Codes or M3U, enter the details, and LiveWire connects and shows the channel count before you start watching. Your IPTV provider gives you these details when you sign up. You can add more later under Settings → Manage providers.

• Xtream Codes: server address, username and password. The guide is loaded from the same server. If your provider gave you a single link (get.php?username=…&password=… or player_api.php?…), paste it into Server URL and LiveWire splits it into the three fields.
• Catch-up: works only if your provider keeps an archive for a channel. For Xtream that comes from the provider. For M3U, the playlist needs catch-up attributes (catchup, catchup-source, catchup-days); without them channels show no archive.
• M3U playlist: the playlist URL, and optionally a guide (XMLTV) URL. If you leave the guide URL empty, LiveWire uses the one advertised in the playlist header (url-tvg or x-tvg-url), if there is one. Movie and series entries in a playlist are skipped; LiveWire plays live TV only.

Plain http:// providers are allowed, because many IPTV servers don't offer HTTPS. Traffic to those servers, including your login, is not encrypted.

If channels won't play, try switching Stream format between MPEG-TS and HLS in Settings.

Privacy

• Provider logins are stored on the device with Android's encrypted shared preferences. The key never leaves the device.
• Backups and device-to-device transfer are turned off, so app data isn't copied to Google Drive or a new device.
• LiveWire connects to your provider (channels, guide, streams), to ESPN's public scoreboard API for the Sports screen, to wherever your provider's channel list says the channel logos are hosted, and to GitHub to check for and download updates. You can turn off the daily update check under Settings → About.
• There are no analytics, ads or crash reporting. The full source is in this repository if you want to check.

Requirements

• Android 6.0 (API 23) or later.
• Built for TVs and TV sticks. It also installs on phones and tablets.

Build from source

You need JDK 17 and the Android SDK. Gradle comes with the wrapper, and the Android Gradle Plugin, SDK levels and library versions are set in app/build.gradle.kts and gradle/libs.versions.toml.

git clone https://git.namillis.me/namillis/LiveWireTV.git
cd LiveWireTV

./gradlew :app:assembleDebug          # debug APK in app/build/outputs/apk/debug/
./gradlew :app:testDebugUnitTest      # unit tests
./gradlew :app:lintDebug              # Android lint
./gradlew :app:assembleRelease        # minified release APK

The debug build's package is com.livewire.tv.debug, so it installs next to a release build without replacing it. To launch it from adb:

adb shell am start -n com.livewire.tv.debug/com.livewire.tv.MainActivity

If your default java isn't 17, point Gradle at a JDK 17 without editing tracked files, either with org.gradle.java.home in ~/.gradle/gradle.properties or by exporting JAVA_HOME.

CI runs the unit tests, lint and a debug build on every pull request and every push to main.

Project layout

app/src/main/kotlin/com/livewire/tv/
  core/player/     PlaybackEngine interface and its ExoPlayer implementation
  core/net/        Response stream helpers (gzip handling)
  di/              Hilt modules
  navigation/      Nav host and the left navigation drawer
  ui/              Theme, shared surfaces, the shared provider form, touch support
  feature/
    onboarding/    First-run setup wizard
    providers/     Xtream and M3U clients, provider storage, Providers screen
    epg/           Guide screen, XMLTV parsing and the guide cache
    catchup/       Archive URLs and past guide listings for catch-up
    home/          Home screen
    player/        Player screen, overlay, Options and channel list panels
    favorites/     Favourites storage, hold-OK menu, Channel info, manage screen
    search/        Search and search history
    sports/        ESPN scoreboard and the channel picker
    settings/      Settings screen and stored preferences
    update/        Update check, download, verification and install
scripts/measure.sh Memory, start-up and APK size measurements on a real device

The player UI talks to PlaybackEngine, not to ExoPlayer directly, so another playback engine can be added later without changing the screens.

Releasing

Pushing a tag like v0.2.1 builds a signed release APK and publishes it as a GitHub Release, with a .sha256 checksum file and update.json that the in-app updater reads. See docs/RELEASING.md for the steps, version numbering and signing setup.

Credits

• Playback by AndroidX Media3 / ExoPlayer.
• Fonts: Inter, Space Grotesk and JetBrains Mono, all under the SIL Open Font License. They're bundled, trimmed to Latin characters, because many TV devices can't download fonts. Licence texts and source versions are in third_party/fonts/.
• Sports data comes from ESPN's public site API. LiveWire isn't affiliated with or endorsed by ESPN.

Disclaimer

LiveWire is a player only. It doesn't provide, host or link to any channels or streams. You need your own provider, and you're responsible for making sure you have the right to watch what it serves.

License

MIT