WPF + LibVLCSharp port of the ZecaTV Android TV IPTV player.

Note: This app was built with AI assistance (Claude, by Anthropic) — every feature, fix, and line in this repo was written by Claude, prompted and directed by a human. It's a personal project, provided as-is with no warranty; use it at your own discretion.

Licensed under the MIT License — free to use, modify, and redistribute.

1. Open ZecaTV.sln in Visual Studio 2022 (".NET desktop development" workload, .NET 8 SDK).
2. Press F5. The first build restores NuGet packages, including about 80 MB of native LibVLC files.

For sharing ZecaTV as something other than "open it in Visual Studio and press F5," the installer\ folder builds two things, both self-contained (they bundle the .NET runtime, so nothing needs to be installed on the machine that runs them — which does make both quite a bit bigger, around 200 MB, mostly the runtime plus LibVLC's own native files):

• A portable copy — a folder (zipped up) you can copy anywhere, even a USB stick, and run ZecaTV.exe from directly. No installer, no admin rights, nothing to set up.
• A setup.exe installer — installs to the current user's own AppData (no admin prompt), adds a Start Menu entry and an uninstaller, and offers a desktop shortcut and launching ZecaTV once install finishes.

From a PowerShell prompt in installer\:

• .\publish.ps1 builds just the portable zip (installer\..\publish\ZecaTV-Portable-win-x64.zip).
• .\build-installer.ps1 builds the portable copy first and then the installer, which needs Inno Setup (free) installed once. Without it, the script tells you as much — you can still open installer\ZecaTV.iss in the Inno Setup app afterward and click Compile by hand.
• The finished installer lands in installer\Output\ZecaTV-Setup-<version>.exe.

Bumping the version for a new build means updating it in two places: ZecaTV\ZecaTV.csproj (<Version>) and installer\ZecaTV.iss (MyAppVersion) — they're not linked automatically.

Both builds are unsigned (a code-signing certificate isn't worth it for a personal app), so Windows SmartScreen may warn the first time the installer or ZecaTV.exe runs on another machine — More info → Run anyway gets past it. This is only ever shown once per machine.

ZecaTV doesn't have real branding yet, so both the installer and the app's own icon (taskbar, shortcuts, tray) currently use the same placeholder — a plain accent-blue "Z" badge (ZecaTV\Assets\ZecaTV.ico) — swap that file out whenever real artwork is ready.

The same table below is also available inside the app: Settings → Controls → View controls….

Click the search box (top bar, next to Reload) or press Ctrl+F, then type. It matches anywhere in a channel's name, case-insensitively — searching "sport" finds "Sport TV 1" and "ESPN Sports HD" alike — and always searches every channel in the active playlist, regardless of which category is currently selected. Results update as you type; ↑/↓ move through them without leaving the box, and Enter plays the selected one. Esc, or clearing the box, goes back to whichever category was open.

Playlists that bundle movies and/or TV series alongside live channels (common with many Xtream Codes logins, and increasingly with M3U playlists too) get two extra tabs in the sidebar — Movies and TV Shows — next to the usual Live TV tab. Each tab has its own categories and remembers its own last-selected one, entirely separately from Live TV's. A playlist with no movies or shows in it simply doesn't show the extra tabs.

• Xtream Codes playlists get their movies and series straight from the panel's own VOD/series API, so they're already correctly separated from live channels — nothing to guess.
• M3U playlists have no such separation built in, so ZecaTV classifies each entry automatically — by its group title and name (a year in parentheses, season/episode markers such as S01E02, a "Movies"/"Series" category name, and similar signals most other IPTV players key off too).
• The TV Shows tab groups individual episodes into one tile per show; opening a show lists its episodes grouped by season, instead of one long flat list of hundreds of episodes.
• A Movie or episode gets a play/pause button and a seek bar once playing — under the video when windowed, along the bottom of the screen in fullscreen — since unlike a live channel, these have a real position and duration to show and scrub through. See the Controls table above for the keyboard shortcuts.
• Favorites, EPG channel mapping, and catch-up remain Live TV-only, same as everywhere else in the app — a Movie/episode's right-click menu only offers Play and Copy stream URL.

Some providers name a category for the genre a bouquet of live channels shows — "Filmes/Séries" for a set of always-on movie/drama channels like TVCine or AMC — rather than for being on-demand, which can fool the automatic guess into putting live channels in the Movies/TV Shows tabs. Right-click that category in the sidebar and choose Treat category as → Live TV (or Movies / TV Shows, for the same mistake in the other direction) to correct it by hand. The correction applies instantly, is remembered for that category name across every playlist that uses it, and shows up under Settings → Category overrides, where each one can be reviewed or removed. Choosing Automatic goes back to ZecaTV's own guess.

Change it from Settings, or from the small EN / PT buttons under Add playlist on the very first screen (before any playlist is configured). Changing it there updates that screen immediately and everything else the moment you add your first playlist. Changing it later from Settings still needs a restart of ZecaTV for the main window and an already-open Settings to fully switch over — any new window opened after the change already reflects it.

ZecaTV can hold several playlists at once, switching between them rather than merging their channels together. Add one from the picker in the top bar or from Settings → Playlists, which also lets you rename, edit, or remove any saved playlist and switch to another with one click.

Favorites and EPG channel mappings are shared across every playlist (matched by the channel's stream URL), so a channel that appears in more than one playlist keeps its favorite/mapping status no matter which one is active. Each playlist does remember its own last-viewed category, though.

If you're upgrading from an earlier build with a single playlist already configured, it's carried over automatically the first time you run this version — nothing to redo.

Categories in the sidebar follow the order they appear in the playlist file itself, not alphabetical — so if you've arranged categories with the M3U Editor before exporting, that order carries straight through.

Click Settings… for a small hub rather than one long form: your saved playlists with buttons to switch, edit, remove, or add one; a summary of your EPG sources with buttons to manage or reload them; a "resume the last channel on startup" toggle; a button to view every keyboard/mouse control; category overrides (see Movies & TV Shows above); a link to the bundled M3U Editor — a standalone web-based playlist editor/manager, unrelated to ZecaTV's own code, that opens in your default browser; your version number; and a shortcut to the %AppData%\ZecaTV logs folder.

Press G or click TV Guide to open a channel-by-channel grid of what's on, similar to TiviMate. It uses whichever EPG (XMLTV) feed came bundled with your playlist automatically — and if your playlist's #EXTM3U header declares several, comma-separated (e.g. an M3U Editor export with multiple EPG sources baked in), each one is loaded as its own independent source, exactly like an extra source added by hand below. A gzip-compressed feed (.xml.gz, or just gzip-compressed bytes regardless of the URL's extension) is decompressed automatically either way.

The currently playing channel's next few programmes also show under the video in the main window, and in the same spot in the fullscreen info bar, whenever guide data is available: nearest first, as HH:mm - HH:mm : Title.

• ◀ / ▶ or PgUp / PgDn move the visible time window; Now jumps back to the current time.
• The category dropdown narrows the grid to one category (handy for a large playlist).
• Click a programme to play its channel in fullscreen.
• Settings → Manage sources… lets you add extra XMLTV feeds — useful if your playlist's own guide is missing some channels. Every loaded source is shown with how many channels and programmes it contributed, or why it failed.
• Each source has an Activate button. Activating one forces automatic matching to use only that source — every other loaded source is ignored for matching purposes until you deactivate it (or activate a different one, which switches automatically). Handy when testing a new source: it won't get a chance to match anything while an older source keeps satisfying every channel first. Per-channel assignments (below) always take priority over this regardless.
• Automatic matching tries, in order: the exact channel ID, then the name with country prefixes and quality tags (HD/FHD/4K/etc.) stripped, then — as a last resort — a looser match for heavily abbreviated guide names (e.g. a guide entry called "SPT1HD" matching a channel named "SPORT TV 1 FHD"). That last step is a genuine guess with guard rails (it won't cross a channel number, and it needs the abbreviation to be a reasonable fraction of the full name's length), not a rule — it can occasionally match the wrong channel. Assigning a channel by hand (below) always overrides it and is the reliable fix when it gets one wrong.
• If a channel's guide data doesn't match automatically (its name or ID doesn't line up with any loaded source), assign it a specific guide entry by hand: right-click the channel → Assign channel EPG…, or open the same tool from Settings → Assign channel EPG…, which lets you pick any channel (not just one you've right-clicked) and lists every mapping you've made so far with a Remove button on each.

Channels with catch-up enabled show a small clock icon in the channel list (main list and the fullscreen side panel), next to the favorite star.

Some IPTV logos are a small mark centered on a much larger transparent (or flat-color) canvas, which makes them look tiny once scaled to fit the channel-list tile even though the tile itself is sized fine. ZecaTV now trims that empty padding off each logo automatically before displaying it (a little breathing room is kept around the trimmed content), so a padded logo fills its tile about as well as an already-tight one does. A logo that's already full-bleed, or one with no single clear background color to trim against, is left exactly as downloaded.

Logos are cached on disk (under %AppData%\ZecaTV\logocache) so a restart doesn't re-download every logo in the playlist. A local M3U file's logos are kept indefinitely, since they only change when you re-import that file; an M3U URL or Xtream playlist's logos come from a provider that can swap an icon at any time, so those are kept for 30 days before being re-downloaded.

If your Xtream Codes login has catch-up (archive/timeshift) enabled for a channel, past programmes in the TV Guide for that channel get a blue tint and are clickable — click one to watch it from the start via catch-up instead of live. A badge appears (top-left of the video, in both windowed and fullscreen) showing which programme you're watching, with a Back to Live button to switch back to the live stream at any time. Clicking the channel name itself (left side of the guide) always jumps back to live, whatever programme cell you're looking at.

Past programmes older than your panel's own catch-up retention window (however many days it reports) are shown dimmed and aren't clickable — there's nothing there to actually watch. This only applies to Xtream Codes playlists: M3U playlists and files have no catch-up concept, so their guide cells never offer it, matching how the provider itself works.

Type a channel's number (shown next to it in both channel lists and in the fullscreen info bar) and press Enter — or just stop typing for a moment and it jumps on its own — to tune straight to it, from anywhere in the app, windowed or fullscreen. Backspace removes the last digit, Esc cancels. If the number isn't in the current playlist, a brief message says so instead.

Right-click the video for a Video ratio submenu with four choices: Fit (default — the stream's own ratio, letterboxed if needed, nothing cropped or distorted), Stretch to fill (fills the whole video area exactly, distorting the picture if the stream's ratio doesn't already match — handy for a stream that reports the wrong ratio and shows unwanted black bars), 4:3, and 16:9 (forces that ratio regardless of what the stream reports). The choice is remembered and reapplied automatically to whatever plays next, and to a resized/fullscreen window while Stretch to fill is active.

Right-click the video (not the channel list) to pick an audio track or subtitle language, when the stream itself offers more than one — this is only ever populated once a channel is actually playing, since that's when LibVLC learns what's in the stream. Subtitles always include an Off option at the top. If a stream carries just one audio track and no subtitles, the corresponding submenu simply says there's nothing to pick from.

On by default (Settings → Window): minimizing ZecaTV sends it to the system tray, near the clock, instead of leaving a button on the taskbar. Click the tray icon (or double-click it, or use its right-click menu's Open ZecaTV) to bring it back. Playback keeps running while minimized to the tray, same as a normal minimize. Closing the window (the × button, or Alt+F4) always fully exits ZecaTV either way — the tray icon's own right-click menu has an Exit as well, since a window that's minimized to the tray has no taskbar button to close from. Turn it off in Settings to go back to a plain taskbar minimize.

For a ZecaTV window left open for days, Settings → Playback can automatically re-fetch your active playlist and its EPG guide on a timer (every 30 min to 24 h, 3 hours by default) — the same thing pressing F5 does, just on its own. It's on by default, and quietly skips a turn (trying again at the next interval) instead of refreshing right when it would interrupt something: while a load is already underway, while fullscreen, or while you're in the middle of a search.

Settings → Backup saves everything ZecaTV remembers — every saved playlist, favorites, and EPG sources/mappings — to a .json file you choose. Restore loads one back, after confirming (it replaces everything currently saved) — restart ZecaTV afterward for the restored data to take effect everywhere.

%AppData%\ZecaTV\

• settings.json holds your saved playlists (and which one is active), favorites, EPG sources and channel mappings, each playlist's last category, the volume, and whether to resume the last channel on startup.
• error.log records unexpected errors. Attach it to bug reports.
• vlc.log records playback attempts and LibVLC's own warnings and errors, rewritten on each start. Attach it to playback bug reports. Stream URLs are shortened so logins aren't written to it.

EPG-related windows (EpgGuideWindow, EpgSourcesWindow, EpgMappingWindow) live at the project root alongside MainWindow, since WPF windows aren't usually nested in subfolders.