Setup guides
Which playlist type should you choose?
Providers often hand you two or three ways to connect and no explanation of the difference. The choice affects your programme guide, your movies library and how often you have to touch the app again, so it is worth two minutes.
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Open Settings › Playlists › Add playlist and the first screen is Playlist Type with three options: M3U Playlist, Xtream Codes and Stalker Portal. Your provider decides which of these are available to you. Where more than one is, the differences below decide which is worth using.
M3U: the universal option
An M3U playlist is a text file listing channels, one after another, each with a name, a group, sometimes a logo, and a stream URL. Nearly every IPTV service can produce one, and InoxTV can read it from a URL or from a file on the device via Select local playlist.
Choose M3U when it is the only thing your provider offers, when you keep a hand-edited playlist of your own, or when you want a file that works in every player rather than just this one.
What it costs you. The whole file has to be downloaded and parsed before anything appears. On a service with tens of thousands of entries that is a noticeable wait, and it happens again every time the playlist updates. The file also carries no programme guide, so you supply an EPG separately in EPG URL (optional), a step Xtream Codes usually removes. And an M3U rarely separates films and series properly, so what should be a movies library often arrives as a very long list of channels instead.
Xtream Codes: the one to prefer
Xtream Codes is an API rather than a file. You enter Server url*, Username* and Password*, and InoxTV asks the server for what it needs when it needs it.
That single difference produces most of the advantages:
- It starts faster and stays fast. Categories load on demand, so a service with 40,000 entries opens about as quickly as one with 4,000.
- Films and series arrive as films and series. The API distinguishes live channels, movies and shows, which is what makes the movies and shows library genuinely usable — seasons, episodes, posters and descriptions instead of a flat list.
- The programme guide usually comes with it. Most panels expose EPG data through the same API, so the TV guide fills in without you finding an EPG URL.
- The guide identifiers match by construction. Because the listings and the channels come out of one database, every programme lands on the right channel. Pairing an M3U with a guide you found somewhere else is where mismatched listings come from.
- You can see your account state. Expiry date, active connections and the allowed maximum come from the API, which turns "it stopped working" into "the subscription ran out on Tuesday".
What it costs you. Two things. The server has to be reachable and responsive for anything to load, so an overloaded panel is felt more directly than with a file you already downloaded. And the connection limit is real: most services allow one or two devices at once, and starting a third stream commonly produces a login failure rather than a clear message.
You can tell whether Xtream Codes is available even if your provider never mentioned it. If the M3U link they sent looks like http://example.com:8080/get.php?username=USER&password=PASS&type=m3u_plus, then http://example.com:8080 is the server URL and USER and PASS are the credentials. Enter those three and you have Xtream Codes.
Stalker Portal: when the box is the account
Stalker Portal comes from the set‑top‑box world, where the subscription is tied to a device rather than to a username. InoxTV asks for Portal url* and Mac address*, and offers Serial(optional), Device id (optional), Device id2 (optional), Signature(optional) and Model (optional) for portals that check more than the MAC.
The MAC field is pre‑filled with 00:1a:79:00:00:00, the standard prefix for these devices. Replace it with the address your provider registered for you. The prefix is not a working account on its own.
Choose Stalker Portal when your provider issued you a MAC address rather than a username, or when they gave you portal details and nothing else.
What it costs you. It is the most fragile of the three. The MAC has to match exactly what the portal expects, portals vary in which optional fields they demand, and a single active session per MAC is common, so leaving InoxTV running on the television and opening the same portal on a phone tends to log one of them out. Programme guide support varies by portal, so budget for setting up an EPG source yourself.
Deciding in one line
| Your situation | Use |
|---|---|
| Provider offers both M3U and Xtream Codes | Xtream Codes |
| You were given a username and password | Xtream Codes |
| You were given a MAC address | Stalker Portal |
| You were given one URL and nothing else | M3U Playlist |
| You maintain your own playlist file | M3U Playlist, from local storage |
| You mostly watch films and series | Xtream Codes |
| App start is slow and the channel list is enormous | Xtream Codes |
Worth knowing
Whichever type you pick, the fields below it are the same shape: Playlist name for something you will recognise later, EPG URL (optional) if you are supplying guide data yourself, and two tick boxes, Include live tv and Include Vod, which are not connected to the importer in this build and can be left alone.
Changing your mind later
Nothing here is permanent. Add a second playlist of a different type, watch through it for an evening, then open Settings › Playlists, select the one you no longer want and turn off Enable playlist. Disabling keeps the entry and its settings while removing its channels from the lists, which is less destructive than deleting and re‑adding when you are still comparing.
Once you know which type you are using, the walkthrough for it is the next step: adding an M3U playlist, adding Xtream Codes, or adding a Stalker Portal.