IPTV EPG Codes

An electronic program guide (EPG) is an application used with digital  televisions to list current and scheduled programmes that are or will be available on each channel and a short summary or description for each programme. An EPG allows the user to view a list of programmes scheduled for the next few hours up to the next seven days.

These codes should be added to your iptv playlist (.m3u) file, these can easily be created and edited using Notepad in Windows.

M3U Playlist

M3U is a file format that contains multimedia playlists. It was originally designed for audio files, such as MP3, though it is often used to point to play video file lists of live TV streams.
An M3U file is a plain text file that specifies the locations of one or more media files. The file is saved with the “M3U” or “m3u” file name extension.
If an m3u file is edited with a text editor, it must be saved in the Windows-1252 format, which is a superset of ASCII. “m3u” files properly use the Latin-1 character set.

Some M3U files may already use UTF-8 character encoding. However, M3U files may also use other character encoding standards. Therefore, the M3U8 extension is used to explicitly state that UTF-8 character encoding is used.

Each entry carries one specification, the specification would in the case of IPTV be a URL. These can come in a variety of forms, not all start with http and may be one of the following:

http://123.123.123.12:1234  (Hyper Text Transfer Proticol)

rtmp://123.123.123.12:1234 (Real Time Messaging Protocol)

mms://123.123.123.12:1234 (Microsoft Media Server)

rtsp://123.123.123.12:1234 (Real Time Streaming Protocol)

#EXTM3U (File header). This is  the format descriptor, (or Extended M3U as it can be called). It is always on the first line of the playlist.

#EXTINF (Channel name). #EXTINF:-1,BBC World News
http://123.12.34.567/LIVE/CHANNEL/PROFILE03.m3u8 (not an actual feed)

M3U8
A file with the M3U8 file extension is a UTF-8 Encoded Playlist file.
The Unicode version of “m3u” is “m3u8”, which uses UTF-8 Unicode characters. “m3u” and “m3u8” files are the basis for the HTTP Live Streaming format used by Apple to stream video to iOS devices.

Creating Groups in m3u Playlists

A playlist can easily be divided in to groups such as News, Music, UK TV, this makes finding channels much easier.
To add a group, add the following to the first channel in your group:
#EXTINF:1 group-title=”NEWS”,BBC World News
http://123.123.123.12:1234.m3u8

or as used in Smart IPTV playlists:

First start with a group name: group, News Channels
On the next line start with the EPG code for the channel: BBC1London.uk,
Next the Channel name: BBC One, 
Then the stream url: http://streamlink1.m3u8

Your playlist should look like this (without colours):

group,United Kingdom

BBC1London.uk,BBC One,http://streamlink1.m3u8

ITV2.uk,ITV2,http://streamlink2.m3u8

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For other countries see:

http://tvprofil.net/xmltv/ (Mainly from Central Europe & the Balkans).

http://siptv.eu/codes/ (Smart IPTV – EPG codes for many countries)