seylan

Fast and simple audio and video streamer which utilitizes yt-dlp and ffmpeg for re-streaming media streams.

seylan works as an accelerator middleware between the source of media streams and media player.

Regular HLS streams found in m3u files, and all the sources that yt-dlp supports, including youtube videos and twitch streams, are supported.

Why

There are many great softwares available for re-streaming and watching IPTV streams (like streamlink, tvheadend, mpv and vlc), but if you happen to use these programs for playing you will notice that for some streams there is a long delay before stream starts to play. It's because some servers are slow to produce/serve m3u files and it takes time to analyze the available formats and this makes switching between the streams an annoying experience, especially on slow networks.

seylan tries to facilitate this problem by getting the streams' metadata and caching formats.

Dependencies

• node runtime: seylan is a node.js program
• yt-dlp: for getting available formats
• ffmpeg: for re-streaming

Installation

via npm:

$ npm i -g seylan

via yarn:

$ yarn global add seylan

After installating the package, add the global prefix directory of npm or yarn to your PATH environment variable. If you are using npm, command npm get prefix prints the current npm prefix.

Configuration

seylan uses environment variables for configuration.

• SEYLAN_PORT: port for seylan server. default is 7777
• SEYLAN_CACHE_INTERVAL: interval for stream caching in milliseconds. default is 300000 (5 minutes)
• SEYLAN_PROXY: proxy to be used for yt-dlp and ffmpeg

Channels

seylan optionally reads channels.json file for prefeching metadata and creating a playlist. The file should be created in $HOME/.config/seylan/channels.json.

Example

{
    "Youtube Stream": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOUTUBE_VIDEO_ID",
    "Twitch Stream": "https://www.twitch.tv/CHANNEL_ID"
}

seylan watches the channels.json file and recreates the playlist on the fly. You can use https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv for finding stream links.

Caching

seylan creates a file in $HOME/.cache/seylan directory for each stream defined in channels.json file. As youtube stream formats get expired after several hours it updates the cache by using an interval.

Usage

Starting the server

$ SEYLAN_PORT=7777 seylan

Getting and playing the playlist by using mpv

$ mpv --playlist=http://localhost:7777/get_playlist

Playing a stream directly

$ mpv "http://127.0.0.1:7777/stream\?url=URI_ENCODED_URL"

systemd integration (Linux)

One way of running seylan on system startup is creating a systemd unit file. Create a file in $HOME/.config/systemd/user/seylan.service with following content:

[Unit]
Description=Seylan
After=network.target

[Service]
# Environment=SEYLAN_PORT=7777
# Environment=SEYLAN_PROXY=http://localhost:3333
ExecStart=/path/to/seylan

Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

And enable the unit:

$ systemctl --user daemon-reload
$ systemctl --user enable --now seylan

License

Licensed under MIT.