Watch Live TV on Linux With Hypnotix

The rise of streaming services like Netflix made people speculate about the dim future of TV channels. While the newer generation might not watch TV anymore, TV channels are not out of fashion yet.

Many streaming services like Hulu and Hotstar include TV channels in their offering. TV channels are also utilizing live-streaming to broadcast their content to viewers on the internet.

Another way to watch live TV is by using IPTV. There are a number of TV channels available via IPTV so that viewers can use the internet to watch the live broadcast. Some channels are available for free, while some might require subscription.

There have been a few applications on Linux to watch IPTV channels, but most have been discontinued.

The Linux Mint team announced a new app that will allow you to watch TV channels via IPTV on your Linux system. Let's see it in detail.

Hypnotix: IPTV application from Linux Mint

Hypnotix is an IPTV streaming application that supports live TV, movies, and series. It supports IPTV providers using M3U URL, Xtream API or local M3U playlist.

If none of the above makes sense to you, don’t worry. Hypnotix comes preconfigured with a huge list of freely available TV channels from all over the world.

You can click on the country or region of your choice. The left sidebar will show you the list of channels. Clicking on a channel will start playing the content in the right sidebar.

You can also go full screen with the F or F11 keyboard shortcut, or use the button in the application.

There is also a provision to handle VoD (Video on Demand) library.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Viewing experience depends on your internet speed and the TV channels’ servers.
• Some TV channels might not work even if they are listed in the application.
• You may go back a few seconds or minutes, but this depends upon the cache.
• You may also pause the live-streaming, and it will maintain a cache so that you can resume later. I don’t know how big the cache could be.
• There is no way to control the video streaming quality as you do on YouTube and other video streaming websites.
• You won’t get the running program’s details in the player.
• This is a TV broadcast, so you get to see the same ads that are broadcasted during program breaks.

Installing Hypnotix on Linux

If you are on Linux Mint, Hypnotix comes preinstalled in newer releases. You canou can just open it from the system menu.

For Ubuntu, you can use an unofficial PPA to install Linux Mint's homegrown apps like Hypnotix. Open a terminal and run the following three commands one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelebek333/mint-tools
sudo apt update
sudo apt install hypnotix

For other Debian based distributions, these dependencies may be required.

• libxapp 2.6+
• libmpv
• python3-imdbpy (for Older Mint and Debian releases, get it from here)
• circle-flags

Now, go to the releases page and download the DEB file.

Under the assets, download the packages.tar.gz file and extract it. You will find a deb file inside the archive. Install the deb file.

sudo dpkg -i <path-to-the-deb-file>

That's it. You have successfully installed Hypnotix IPTV player on your system.

Troubleshooting: Issues with Hypnotix Video Player

On my Linux Mint 22, when I started a channel from the list, it opened in a new window, eventually crashing the entire application. This can be avoided by following the steps below.

First, go to the settings page of Hypnotix.

In the settings window, go to the Playback section. Here, in the MPV options field, enter the value as give below.

vo=x11

Close the window and restart Hypnotix. You should be able to use the app without any issues now.

Working With Hypnotix

Adding a New Provider

Hypnotix comes with some Free IPTV channels. So, the default app shows a countrywide list of free channels and some VoD contents and movies.

If you have channels that are available as m3u playlist files, you can add it to Hypnotix.

On the settings page, click on the Add New Provider button.

In the next window, fill in the details like Name, URL, Path etc. and then press OK.

This new list of channels will be added to your list.

Add a New Channel

Let's say you have a streaming to watch. You can do that with Hypnotix. First, click on the “+” icon on the home page to add a new channel.

Now, in the new window, give a name to the stream and add the URL of the stream. Now, enter the URL to the logo. This is mandatory to add a new channel. If you have a local logo, first upload it to Imgur and then grab the URL from there.

Now, press OK. This will add the channel to your favorites section.

Click on the added channel to view the stream.

Here, you can click on the top-right star button to remove it from favorites and then restart the Hypnotix app for the changes to take effect.