An IPTV player for iOS 6, built for a jailbroken iPhone 4S / iPhone 5.
It browses the public iptv-org catalogue (16,763 channels across 178 countries) and plays them on hardware that predates every modern way of doing it. Written in Swift, compiled with a 5.6.3 toolchain and shipped against the 5.1.5 runtime so it will actually load on an A5.
iOS 6 cannot reach the modern web. Its TLS stack is too old for the ciphers
almost every stream origin now requires, and essentially the whole catalogue is
HTTPS. The app works around this with a loopback HTTP proxy
(LocalStreamProxy). The system media player is pointed at 127.0.0.1, and the
proxy fetches upstream through a vendored libcurl + OpenSSL, rewriting playlists
so every nested URL comes back through itself. That also lets it inject the
User-Agent and Referer headers some origins demand, which the player cannot
set on its own.
A second problem: some streams carry AC-3 audio, which the iOS 6 media stack cannot decode. Those are transcoded to AAC on the fly (demux the MPEG-TS, decode AC-3 with a vendored FFmpeg, re-encode as AAC, remux) before the player ever sees them.
| Screen | What it does |
|---|---|
| Countries | The catalogue, ordered by channel count or alphabetically. Favourites live at the top. |
| Channels | A grid of logo tiles for one country, with search. |
| Player | Fullscreen. Swipe left/right to zap, down to close, tap for controls. |
| Settings | Catalogue refresh, country sort order, diagnostics, the debug log. |
| Countries | Settings |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Both shots are an iPhone 4S on iOS 6. The channel count in Settings is lower than the figure above because that device is running a refreshed catalogue rather than the bundled one.
Roughly half of any public IPTV catalogue is dead at any given moment, and which half changes constantly. Opening a channel only to stare at a spinner for 15 seconds is the single most annoying thing about using one of these lists.
Check (top right of a country's channel grid) tests every stream in that country and dims the ones that do not answer.
How it works:
- Only
.m3u8playlist URLs are checked. A raw MPEG-TS endpoint never ends, so a request against one would run for the full timeout and prove nothing. Those stay unchecked, and unchecked always counts as alive. - Six requests run in parallel. Deliberately more than the two cores an A5 has, because these threads spend their time waiting on a socket rather than computing. The standard "one job per core" approach would take four times as long.
- A stream counts as alive only if the response body is actually a playlist
(contains
#EXTM3U). An HTTP 200 on its own is not enough. Parked domains, captive portals and ISP block pages all answer 200 with HTML, and those are exactly the origins that would otherwise be marked alive forever. - Verdicts are written as they land, so stopping the scan halfway still leaves the list better informed than it was. Press Stop (the same button) or simply leave the screen to cancel. It also stops automatically when you open a channel, so the scan is not competing with playback for bandwidth.
- Progress replaces the country name in the title bar while it runs.
What a verdict means:
- Dead channels are dimmed, not hidden, and sink to the bottom of the list. A verdict can be up to a week stale, and a stream that came back should still be one tap away.
- Verdicts expire after 7 days. An unknown stream is always treated as alive.
- Only failures are stored, so the store stays small: a few hundred URLs at worst. Entries are keyed by stream URL rather than by channel name or position, both of which move when the catalogue is refreshed.
- You do not have to run Check at all. Every time you play a channel the result is recorded. Reaching a playable state marks it alive, and the 15 second connect watchdog marks it dead. Check only fills in the channels nobody has opened yet.
Because a wrong verdict costs a dimmed tile and never a hidden channel, the scan is deliberately biased toward marking things alive.
The catalogue is a set of compact per-country JSON files in index/, plus a
countries.json manifest. There are two ways to refresh it.
Downloads the four raw iptv-org API files (~20.7 MB, straight to disk, never through memory), rebuilds the index on-device, and swaps it in. The new index is only swapped in once it is complete on disk, so a refresh that is interrupted leaves the previous catalogue intact.
Settings also offers Revert to bundled, which drops the refreshed index and goes back to the one that shipped with the app. That is the way out of a refresh which produced a worse catalogue than the one it replaced.
One caveat worth knowing: the on-device rebuild cannot run the liveness probe that the desktop script does. That probe is around 17,000 HTTP requests, which is not something to ask of a phone. So a refreshed catalogue carries noticeably more dead entries than the bundled one. The Check button and the player's connect watchdog are what cover the difference.
The bundled index is generated here, and this is the version that can afford to be picky:
# fast: format filtering only
./tools/build_index.py --out index
# slow, and what the shipped index is built with.
# additionally drops streams that are dead or serve fMP4
./tools/build_index.py --out index --probe --workers 40It reads the iptv-org static API and filters:
- Dropped by format: DASH (
.mpd) andrtmp,rtsp,srt,mmsh. The iOS 6 media stack has no support for these regardless of transport. - Dropped by
--probe: anything that does not answer with#EXTM3U, and anything serving fMP4 (#EXT-X-MAP,.m4s), which iOS 6 cannot decode. - Logos are kept only in formats
UIImagecan decode (png, jpg, gif). The catalogue also carries.svgand.webp, which would just be a wasted fetch per cell.
Output is one file per country plus the manifest. Per-country rather than one big file because the full catalogue is ~2 MB of JSON, and parsing that in one go on an iPhone 4S is slow and spikes memory. Splitting it keeps the parse cost proportional to what you are actually looking at.
Copy the resulting index/ into the app bundle to change what ships.
Channel data comes from iptv-org, via its static API at https://iptv-org.github.io/api.
Used as data only. None of that project's code or tooling is downloaded,
executed, or vendored. build_index.py reads the published JSON and nothing
else. iptv-org aggregates publicly available streams; it does not host any of
them, and neither does this app.
Icons are drawn from Phosphor (MIT) geometry, transcribed as paths. No asset ships and no repository is cloned.
See CLAUDE.md for the full toolchain story. In short: sources
are mirrored in src/, copied to the build server, and built with ./build.sh,
which produces tvold_ios6.ipa. The app is compiled with Swift 5.6.3 but ships
the 5.1.5 runtime dylibs, patched down to MinimumOSVersion 6.0 and ad-hoc
signed.
Add this source:
https://cydia.rousseaddict.online
The repo page also exposes a direct OTA install link, so you can install straight from Safari on the device without a package manager.
The prebuilt IPA lives in build/:
| File | Target | Notes |
|---|---|---|
build/tvold_ios6.ipa |
iOS 6 to 7 | The only build. Swift runtime swapped to 5.1.5 and Mach-O version-min patched to 6.0. |
The IPA is ad-hoc signed, so it installs on a jailbroken device (Filza,
ipainstaller, AppSync) but not on a stock one. To run on a stock device you
must re-sign it with your own certificate.
Working on device: catalogue browsing, favourites, logos, playback through the proxy, the AC-3 to AAC transcode, dead-stream marking, and catalogue refresh.
Tested on iPhone 4S (iOS 6) and iPhone 5 (iOS 7).
Known limitation: streams that ship audio and video as separate HLS renditions, play silently or not at all. Joining them in the proxy has been scoped but not built.