What is jellyfin-htsp-tuner?

This project is a plugin for Jellyfin, the open-source media server, that lets it pull in live TV channels from a separate program called Tvheadend, which handles TV tuner hardware and channel data. Jellyfin already has an official plugin for Tvheadend, but that older plugin only uses Tvheadend's richer connection method, called HTSP, to fetch channel names and program guide information. For the actual video, it falls back to a simpler and less capable method. This new plugin instead uses that richer connection for the video itself, so the stream is pulled directly and reassembled inside Jellyfin rather than fetched a plainer way. To use it, you add it the same way you would add any live TV tuner in Jellyfin, and you can add more than one if you have multiple Tvheadend servers. Once you add a working connection, Jellyfin automatically sets up the matching program guide, so you do not have to manually match channels to guide listings. Beyond basic streaming, the plugin tries to get technical details right automatically, things like video quality, color information, and audio languages, so that Jellyfin makes good decisions about whether to play a stream directly or convert it first. It supports multiple audio tracks and marks audio description tracks for accessibility. Subtitles that are transmitted as images are carried through and shown, though an older style of subtitle called teletext is deliberately left out because Jellyfin cannot currently display it without breaking playback. Each channel keeps a limited amount of video buffered in memory rather than saving to disk, so a viewer who is briefly behind does not stall or fill up storage. If several people are watching the same channel, they share a single connection instead of each opening a new one. The plugin also tries to fill in artwork for TV shows that do not have any pictures available, by grabbing an occasional still image from the live video itself and stamping the channel's logo on it, done carefully to avoid interfering with anyone actively watching. It also cleans up leftover artwork files for old programs that Jellyfin itself forgets to delete. Recording still happens through Jellyfin's own recording feature, working the same way it would with any other tuner.