Proxy Playlists

🔄 Using built in proxy

Only available in m3u editor v0.8.0+

m3u editor includes powerful stream proxying capabilities through m3u-proxy. This allows you to proxy all stream URLs through your server, which is useful for:

• Connection Management: Avoid “max connections exceeded” errors from your provider
• Stream Pooling: Multiple users can share a single provider connection
• IP Masking: All requests appear to come from your server
• Transcoding: Convert streams to HLS format (external proxy only)

Enabling Proxy for a Playlist

1. Navigate to Playlists ➡️ Create/Edit ➡️ Step 5
2. Toggle the Enable Proxy option
3. Save changes

When enabled, all channel URLs in the playlist will point to m3u editor, which will proxy the stream content.

Enable/Disable dynamically

You can also utilize the proxy “on the fly” via URL variables.

Adding the ?proxy= to the end of your playlist with true or false, which will enable or disable the proxy functionality dynamically.

To override the Playlist proxy settings, append ?proxy=true, or ?proxy=false, to your playlist url, e.g.: http://localhost:36400/9e6a2337-e48b-404e-bec4-787473b5a4b8/playlist.m3u?proxy=false

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🏗️ Proxy Architecture Options

Embedded Proxy (Default)

The embedded proxy runs inside the m3u-editor container and is enabled by default (M3U_PROXY_ENABLED=true).

Pros:

• Simple setup - no additional containers needed
• Good for basic proxying needs

Cons:

• No Redis-based stream pooling
• No hardware acceleration support
• Shares resources with the main application

External Proxy (Recommended)

Recommended

Running m3u-proxy as a separate container provides better performance and more features.

Pros:

• Stream Pooling: Multiple clients share one provider connection via Redis
• Hardware Acceleration: GPU transcoding support (VAAPI, NVENC)
• Better Performance: Dedicated resources for streaming
• Independent Scaling: Scale proxy independently from the main app

Configuration:

# In m3u-editor environment
- M3U_PROXY_ENABLED=false
- M3U_PROXY_HOST=m3u-proxy  # Container name
- M3U_PROXY_PORT=38085
- M3U_PROXY_TOKEN=your-secure-token

See the Getting Started guide for complete docker-compose examples.

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🔄 Stream Pooling

New (v0.8.0)

Stream pooling allows multiple clients to share a single transcoded stream from m3u-proxy without consuming additional provider connections.

How It Works

Without Pooling:

User 1 → m3u-editor → m3u-proxy → Provider Connection 1
User 2 → m3u-editor → m3u-proxy → Provider Connection 2 ❌ (REJECTED if limit=1)

With Pooling (Enabled):

User 1 → m3u-editor → m3u-proxy → Provider Connection 1
User 2 → m3u-editor → m3u-proxy → Same Connection ✅
User 3 → m3u-editor → m3u-proxy → Same Connection ✅

Requirements for Stream Pooling

• External m3u-proxy setup
• Redis enabled (REDIS_ENABLED=true on m3u-proxy)
• ENABLE_REDIS_POOLING=true on m3u-proxy

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🎬 HLS Storage Configuration

When using the proxy with transcoding, HLS segments are temporarily stored. Configure storage behavior with these environment variables:

Variable	Default	Description
HLS_TEMP_DIR	/tmp/hls	Directory for HLS segments
HLS_GC_ENABLED	true	Enable garbage collection
HLS_GC_INTERVAL	60	GC interval in seconds
HLS_GC_AGE_THRESHOLD	300	Delete segments older than this (seconds)

For high-traffic setups, consider mounting HLS_TEMP_DIR to a fast storage volume (SSD/RAM disk).

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🖥️ Hardware Acceleration

Hardware acceleration for transcoding is only available with the external proxy setup.

VAAPI (Intel/AMD)

m3u-proxy:
  image: sparkison/m3u-proxy:latest
  devices:
    - /dev/dri:/dev/dri

NVIDIA (NVENC)

m3u-proxy:
  image: sparkison/m3u-proxy:latest
  runtime: nvidia
  environment:
    - NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all

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🐛 Debugging

To debug proxy issues, add the M3U_PROXY_LOG_LEVEL environment variable to have the m3u-proxy process pipe output to /var/www/html/storage/logs/m3u-proxy.log in the container.

⚠️ Warning: Only enable for troubleshooting as the log file can grow quickly.

Example docker compose addition:

services:
  m3u-editor:
    image: sparkison/m3u-editor:latest
    container_name: m3u-editor
    environment:
      - M3U_PROXY_LOG_LEVEL=info 
    ...

Log levels: DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR

For external proxy, set LOG_LEVEL on the m3u-proxy container:

m3u-proxy:
  environment:
    - LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG

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📡 Using MediaFlow Proxy

While m3u editor has a built in proxy option, using MediaFlow Proxy has a few advanatges, such as:

• Convert MPEG-DASH streams (DRM-protected and non-protected) to HLS
• Support for non-DRM protected DASH live and VOD streams
• Proxy and modify HLS (M3U8) streams in real-time
• Proxy HTTP/HTTPS links with custom headers

If you don’t need any of the above, the built-in proxy will likely work fine for you. However, if you have more advanced needs, such as DRM, then MediaFlow Proxy is a great option.

Using the MediaFlow Proxy setup as an example:

services:
  mediaflow-proxy:
    image: mhdzumair/mediaflow-proxy
    environment:
      - API_PASSWORD=YOUR_PROXY_API_PASSWORD
    ports:
      - 8888:8888
networks: {}

Your proxied m3u playlist can then be access via: http://localhost:8888/proxy/hls/manifest.m3u8?d=YOUR_M3U_EDITOR_PLAYLIST_URL&api_password=YOUR_PROXY_API_PASSWORD

This is assuming the default MediaFlow Proxy setup, which exposes the http://localhost:8888 URL, make sure to change as needed.

Replace YOUR_PROXY_API_PASSWORD with a secure password, and change the YOUR_M3U_EDITOR_PLAYLIST_URL string to your Playlist URL from m3u editor (can be found via the URLs in the Playlist edit screen Step 1, e.g.: something like: http://localhost:36400/9e6a2337-e48b-404e-bec4-787473b5a4b8/playlist.m3u).

More setup information can be found on the MediaFlow Proxy page.