Show HN: Turning IINA player into the ultimate streaming service

1 point

3 years ago

Hello! I’ve been working on a neat toy for Raycast [https://www.raycast.com/](A MacOS launcher/spotlight alternative), it turns Raycast into a remote that lets you instantly play hundreds of TV channels in VLC or IINA player for MacOS. Search for what you want in Raycast, and hit ENTER to play it in IINA (Yes, it's really that simple). Check out the demo video in the link provided

Some background

Live TV

* A collection of 200+ live TV live stream links that I’ve been indexing and transcoding over a couple of months. The video quality is pretty decent too, about 60% of these streams are in 1080p, while the minimum quality of the remaining streams is 720p. * You can toggle a TV guide view where you can see what’s currently playing, how much time is left, and what’s airing next. This guide is composed of data scraped from a bunch of websites. The guide is automatically updated daily for every channel.

Sports

* There’s a sports view that shows the schedule for each sport over a 3-day window: 1. Yesterday - If a sports event has ended, a hyperlink to the highlights is provided. 2. Today - If a sports event is airing today, you’ll get a list of all the channels that will be airing that specific sports event and you can instantly start playing the match in VLC or IINA player. 3. Tomorrow - If a game is airing tomorrow, you can set a notification to remind you. (I haven’t built this functionality yet)

You can map certain keyboard combinations to skip forward (e.g. ⌘ + ⇧ + >) and skip backward (e.g. ⌘ + ⇧ + <) so you can change channels without opening Raycast at all. You flip channels just like you would with a TV remote control.

Future plans

  * I'm frequently adding new channels to the library and I have a discord server where I accept requests for new channels. The library keeps growing!

* I’m planning to build the same streaming functionality for movies and TV shows. Search for a movie or TV show and instantly play it in VLC or IINA.

How to get access

Many months of work have gone into locating and acquiring the data as well as building the infrastructure that makes this extension simple and seamless. I am very happy with the result. I had no intention of sharing this with anything more than a handful of friends and family but I have received a few requests from people who really wanted to try it out. I'm opening it up to 100 people max. This is the number of people I can reasonably service(without degrading the quality of the service) and answer support for. It costs me around $5 per month to spin up a new instance for each person. If you are willing to throw in an extra $2 to sponsor my coffee-drinking habit, I'll be happy to give you a spot. If this looks interesting to you and you want to get access, you can reach out to me at [email protected].