IPTV is an acronym for Internet Protocol Television. It’s a digital TV service that delivers video over the internet. IPTV can be live or on-demand.
This roundup highlights the finest IPTV streaming applications for Linux. The tools support live TV, movies, and series.
Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion.
Click the links in the table below to learn more about each program.
| IPTV Players | |
|---|---|
| Open TV | Billed as an ultra-fast, simple and powerful cross-platform IPTV app |
| IPTVnator | Cross-platform IPTV player application with multiple features |
| Tunarr | Create and configure live TV channels |
| dizqueTV | Create live TV channel streams from media on your Plex servers |
| TVHplayer | Desktop client for playback and recording live TV with TVheadend |
| Megacubo | IPTV streaming app |
| Hypnotix | IPTV streaming application with support for live TV, movies and series |
| termv | Bash script to select an iptv stream using fzf and play it using mpv |
| Better IPTV | Combines a Rust backend with a Tauri-based interface |
| Another IPTV Player | IPTV streaming solution |
| TVDemon | GTK4 IPTV player supporting M3U, Xtream and EPG |
| Televido | Access German language public broadcasting live streams |
| yuki-iptv | IPTV player with EPG support |
| Bing-r | Desktop IPTV player with playlist management and mpv playback |
Note: Some AI-heavy projects previously included in this roundup have been removed in accordance with our policy on AI-heavy software.
This article has been updated to reflect the changes outlined in our recent announcement.
 Explore our carefully curated directory of recommended free and open source software, covering every major software category.The directory forms part of our extensive collection of articles for Linux enthusiasts. It includes hundreds of detailed reviews, together with free and open source alternatives to proprietary software from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. LinuxLinks also covers interesting projects worth exploring, Linux-compatible hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful free and open source Linux application that we haven’t covered? Tell us about it using our submission form. |
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Have tried all these and they are simply not good enough. All Rubbish
I’m currently developing a cross-platform Qt-based IPTV player. It’s pretty alpha at the moment but does what I want. I’m not sure whether I’ll open source it or follow something like the model of HiFile (i.e. sell it for Windows, Mac with no charge for Linux).
Thanks for letting us have a binary of your IPTV player. We’ll provide feedback as promised.
Hi Steve, QiTV developer here. Thanks for including it in the roundup! I’d be interested to hear which version you tested and what you felt its main shortcomings were. Specific feedback would be useful to understand where the experience could be improved.
Cheers,
Ozan
Steve
I’ve seen your AI policy. Are you going to remove some of these in light of that policy? QiTV, IPTVnator, and Tunarr appear AI-heavy given their AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md setting out detailed plans for LLM development.
Hi Alan
At this stage, we’ve yet to reach a firm decision on grandfathering projects that were included before our AI-heavy policy was introduced. We’re therefore reviewing existing inclusions on a case-by-case basis before deciding whether any changes are needed to the roundup.