What's new in VirtualChannels.

One clean lineup in front of every media server you run. 1.1 is about the guide being right — for Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, and Channels DVR at the same time — and about the app holding up when real tuners and real networks misbehave.

The lineup is a number line

Broadcast channels first on their real numbers (6.1 stays 6.1), then your stations (100+), then imports (1000+) — consistently in every export: lineup.json, the M3U playlist, and the guide. Channels DVR numbers playlist channels in the order they appear, so this also fixes scrambled ordering there.

Channels DVR, done right

• The setup guidance is now truthful: Channels DVR's HDHomeRun mode reads lineups from port 80, which macOS reserves — so the app points you at a Custom Channels source instead, which works on any port. The Setup & Help guide has the steps.
• The device identifies as VChannels2.0 instead of borrowing a real SiliconDust model number.

Guide health check, built in

Settings → Guide → Check Guide Now reads the guide exactly as your servers fetch it and reports what would break an import: channels with no listings, overlaps, gaps, playlist entries that match nothing. Also served at /guide-check.json.

Richer guide data

Real runtimes, video quality and aspect, audio format, and previously-shown markers — so DVRs set to "new episodes only" stop recording every rerun on a virtual channel as a first run.

Fixes

• Live streams no longer drop data when a server reads slowly while starting a transcode — playback that aborted mid-stream now holds.
• Sources no longer report "offline" after every app launch; refreshes wait for the network to come up and retry briefly. Same fix for HDHomeRun tuners, which had their own copy of the race.
• Event channels no longer show day-long holes past the guide window — placeholder filler now covers everything the guide publishes.
• Double-encoded text from media filenames ("Eddie’s Exes") is repaired before it reaches the guide.
• Guides that fail strict XMLTV validation can be produced to spec with Settings → Guide → Strict XMLTV (drops the non-standard elements some servers read; leave off unless a client rejects the guide).

Verified

tv_validate_file (strict mode), tv_sort --duplicate-error, xmllint, and the built-in checker all pass clean on a 92-channel lineup mixing a real HDHomeRun, virtual stations, and two IPTV sources.

The first signed public build. VirtualChannels turns folders of media into linear TV channels and presents everything you own — your own channels, a real HDHomeRun, and any IPTV source — to Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin as a single tuner with a single guide.

Guide data your server will actually accept

A guide can be perfectly valid and still be thrown away. Several things were being discarded silently, and are now fixed.

• Programme details survive ingest. Sports and IPTV feeds emit XMLTV elements out of the order the DTD prescribes; strict parsers drop those programmes without a word. Everything is re-emitted in the correct order.
• No holes. Event channels only publish listings while an event is on, which leaves gaps that some servers render as dead air or drop entirely. Gaps are filled with hour-aligned placeholder blocks.
• No duplicates. Feeds that list the same slot repeatedly now collapse to one entry.
• Channel numbers are published in the element servers actually read.
• Programme synopses are carried through and shown in the app.

Channel artwork

• Channel logos are taken from the guide for sources that publish no artwork of their own — a tuner's channel list carries none, but its guide does.
• A channel you build shows its first item's poster when you haven't chosen a logo: the series poster for a show, the film's own poster for a movie.

Channel numbering you choose

Numbering used to be whatever import order produced, which could put a streaming feed ahead of broadcast channel 2. Organize Lineup (in VC Tuner) lays the whole lineup out deliberately:

• Real tuners keep their broadcast numbers — 6.1 is 6.1.
• The channels you build follow, from a starting number you set.
• Imported sources follow those, grouped so each provider stays together.

Numbers you set by hand are never moved, and running it twice changes nothing.

HDHomeRun support

• Finds your tuner. Discovery now broadcasts on the local network rather than relying on an internet lookup, so it works on an isolated LAN.
• Uses your subscription. If your device carries a guide entitlement, its listings are imported automatically — nothing to paste. The app states plainly whether the subscription is active, absent, or lapsed.
• Matches guide to lineup. A tuner's channel list and its guide are published by different systems and don't share identifiers; they are now joined correctly, including for subchannels that share a station name.
• Manual entry remains for a tuner on another subnet, where a broadcast never arrives.

Streaming honesty

Some providers answer a request for a channel with perfectly valid video that simply isn't that channel — a placeholder clip served when a feed is blacked out, unauthorised, or idle. Nothing about the bytes reveals this.

• A stream that resolves to a known public demo asset is refused.
• A channel whose own guide says nothing is on refuses before pulling a single byte, rather than relaying filler.
• Failed tunes explain themselves in the log instead of failing anonymously.

Playing broadcast television natively

Everything needed to read, decode, and inspect a broadcast stream is now done with Apple frameworks — no external tools involved.

• A transport-stream reader that handles arbitrary network chunking and recovers from dropped packets.
• MPEG-2 video decoded through VideoToolbox.
• AC-3 and E-AC-3 audio decoded through the system's own codecs.

Interface

• Light and dark, with a toggle at the end of every screen header.
• Settings reachable from the bottom of the sidebar.
• Add HDHomeRun is discovery-first: everything answering on the network is listed and labelled, including this Mac, rather than quietly filtered.
• Guide shows a programme synopsis alongside the schedule.

Library fixes

• Search matches whole words. Searching for a show no longer pulls in unrelated episodes whose titles merely contain those letters.
• Select All on a series adds that series, regardless of what's typed in the search box.

Performance

• Fixed two runaway loops that could pin a CPU core and make the interface unresponsive.
• Guide data is parsed once and cached rather than re-read on every request; a large subscription guide no longer times out.
• Removed heavy database work from the interface thread.