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Providers

A provider is an upstream source you configure — a URL playlist, a local file, or an Xtream Codes account. Providers can be large and noisy; M3Undle's job is to make them manageable.

Providers are separate from what gets published

Adding a provider doesn't publish its channels by itself. Provider groups initially appear as unmapped, grouped the way the provider organized them. Nothing appears in your published lineup until a profile is linked to the provider, channels are mapped, and output is built — see Build a Lineup.

Multiple providers, one lineup

You can configure and browse multiple providers at once. A profile can link to more than one provider (each with a priority), letting you build one combined output lineup from several sources. The shared /m3u/m3undle.m3u and /xmltv/m3undle.xml endpoints always serve the currently active profile's output.

What a provider tracks

For each provider, M3Undle tracks:

  • Last refresh time and success/failure status
  • Channel count seen on the last successful fetch
  • Its associated profile and current published status
  • An optional per-provider maximum concurrent stream limit
  • A relay policy controlling how M3Undle handles that provider's stream: Auto (clean relay only for channels classified Unstable), On (always clean relay), or Off (direct relay only) — see Retry, Failover, and Cooldowns

Guide-source management (XMLTV) is handled separately per provider — see EPG.

Your mappings survive provider changes

A channel's identity does not include the provider's host, username, password or display name. For Xtream providers it follows the provider's own stream id. This means that changing a provider's URL or password, or a channel being renamed, keeps the same channel — and everything you attached to it: selections, custom-group memberships, numbers, overrides and EPG mappings.

  • Provider outages. A fetch that returns no live channels, or less than half of what is currently active, is treated like a failed fetch: nothing is changed and the last known lineup keeps publishing. The dashboard shows a refresh problem and an incomplete lineup event explains what was held. If the provider returns the same reduced lineup on three consecutive refreshes, M3Undle accepts it as a real change.
  • Channels the provider stops listing. They become inactive but are kept. They are purged only after 30 days unseen, and only if nothing depends on them — a mapped, numbered, overridden or custom-group channel is never purged. Groups you have configured are kept even when the provider stops listing them.
  • Large changes are visible. When a refresh deactivates more than half of a large provider's channels, a warning event is raised. Your mappings are preserved.

To be told about provider problems by Matrix or email, see Administrator Notifications. The retention and held-fetch settings are in Environment Variables.

Provider types

See Add the First Provider for the four Add Provider tabs (From URL, From File, Xtream Codes, and Import) and Manage Providers for credential security and Xtream encryption-key rotation.