Stream Proxying

Every published stream URL points at M3Undle, never at the raw provider. This isn't just convenience — it's a security guarantee: provider stream URLs typically embed credentials directly (http://provider/{username}/{password}/stream.ts), so a client that received the raw provider URL would receive those credentials too.

Relay, not redirect

M3Undle relays the stream — it opens the upstream connection itself and pipes the bytes through — rather than redirecting the client to the provider. A redirect would hand the client the real provider URL (and its embedded credentials) on every request. M3Undle never does this.

Shared upstream connections

When multiple clients request the same channel at the same time, M3Undle opens one upstream provider connection and fans it out to every subscriber, instead of opening a separate provider connection per viewer. This matters directly for your provider stream limit: five people watching the same channel counts as one upstream connection, not five.

A small in-memory buffer smooths over late joiners and brief upstream hiccups without needing a large disk-backed cache.

Handling unstable providers

Some providers are noisier than others — brief stalls, connection drops, occasional bad data. M3Undle watches each channel and grades its recent health as Stable, Cautious, or Unstable, then automatically adapts how it handles that channel: unstable channels get a more careful reconnect strategy and can be routed through an FFmpeg clean-up step, all without you touching anything. The full explanation — including how to see a channel's current health on the Streams page and how to override the automatic behavior per provider — is in Retry, Failover, and Cooldowns.

Browser and HDHomeRun compatibility

For live MPEG-TS delivery, M3Undle can send null-packet keepalives during short upstream gaps to keep stall-sensitive external players (like browsers) connected — but HDHomeRun-only sessions are left as plain upstream MPEG-TS, since DVR transcode pipelines expect unmodified content. Browser playback that needs HLS gets a generated HLS session created on demand, fed from the same shared internal relay other viewers of that channel are already using — it doesn't open a second upstream connection.

Where you configure this

Session limits, buffer size, and reconnect behavior are all configurable in Settings → Streaming, under the Stream Proxy section — see Guides > Browser Playback for a walkthrough of those controls, and Reference > Environment Variables for the advanced env/config-only controls. The per-provider stream format and relay policy options are covered in Guides > Manage Providers.

For how the shared session, subscriber fanout, and reconnect logic are actually built, see Architecture > Stream Pipeline.