[vexorian]

Hello. I am a dev of a iptv software and we tend to use Kodi with Simple IPTV to watch the channels we create with that server. We've been trying to deal with improving channel loading times, and we noticed that wheneer you select a channel Kodi seems to start the stream, close it quickly then start the stream again.  A google search took me to a thread in this forum in which it's said that this behavior is intentional. But no more details were given and then the thread became about a different topic.

So I'm interested in learning why the client works like this. I am guessing that the first call to the endpoint is to gather some information before playing. I hope that understanding this will make me help switching channels in our iptv server much faster in kodi.  Would be nice to know what headers to expect in this case.

[routir]

I guess, if your server hosts a set of different quality streams(usually HLS), IPTV Simple just selects the best of them according to the resolution settings in Kodi. There is no way to know which is which without probing one by one. To play the highest at once, you have to mark out the exact stream in your playlist.

[phunkyfish]

This is how ffmpeg works. Sometimes you need to probe the stream in order to figure out what type of stream it is.

You can set the mime type to avoid an initial lookup, and there will soon be an extra option (default enabled) in ffmpegdirect to avoid another lookup for HLS streams. Once that is released try that and see if it works.