Feral HTPC is a dedicated, feature-rich desktop client designed specifically for Home Theater PCs (HTPCs) running Windows. It interfaces directly with your Channels DVR server to provide a seamless, controller-friendly interface for Live TV, Movies, and external streaming services.
Powered by LibVLCSharp, Feral HTPC bypasses the limitations of standard web players by offering advanced A/V synchronization, raw stream handling, and robust network error recovery.
- Core Features
- Installation Process
- Using the Settings Page
- Using the Mobile Remote Control
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Changelog
- Gallery
- Custom Video Player: Built on VLC's engine, optimized for MPEG-TS and HLS streams.
- Auto-Skip Commercials: Automatically jumps over marked commercial breaks during movie playback.
- Quad Multi-view: Watch up to four live streams simultaneously with dynamic audio switching.
- Smart Guide: Customizable timeline with sticky headers and enhanced metadata support.
- Hardware Agnostic Audio: Optional forced AAC transcoding for hardware setups that struggle with raw AC-3 OTA audio.
- Prerequisites: * A Windows 10/11 PC.
- An active Channels DVR server running on your local network or accessible via a remote VPN.
- Download: Navigate to the Releases section of this repository and download the latest
FeralInstaller.exefile.
- Important Browser Note: We highly recommend using Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Brave for the download. Microsoft Edge has aggressive security filters that may incorrectly flag and block the download of new executable files.
- Install: Run the installer and follow the standard Windows setup prompts.
- Windows SmartScreen Popup: Because Feral HTPC is a newly released, independently developed application, Windows SmartScreen will likely display a blue "Windows protected your PC" warning when you try to run the installer. To proceed with the installation, click "More info" and then select "Run anyway".
- First Run: Launch Feral HTPC. The application will automatically attempt to discover your local Channels DVR server using network broadcasting. If it finds one, you will be connected immediately. If your server is on a different subnet, you can manually enter its IP address on the Settings page.
The Settings page is the central hub for customizing your Feral HTPC experience. You can access it from the main navigation menu.
Servers and Remote
- Mobile Remote Control URL: Displays the exact web address you need to type into your smartphone's browser to access the remote control.
- Discovered Local DVR Servers: Lists all automatically detected Channels DVR servers on your network.
- Manual DVR Server Address: Allows you to input a custom IP address and port (e.g.,
http://192.168.1.50:8089) if network discovery fails.
Preferences
- Playback Preferences: Enable auto-skipping for movie commercials, force the player to open in fullscreen, toggle the Live TV Time-Shift buffer, or force all live channels through the local FFmpeg proxy for maximum stability.
- Guide Preferences: Set how many hours of guide data to load at once (4, 8, or 12 hours), toggle sticky time headers, and enable or disable the display of Virtual Channels.
- Audio Settings: Force AAC Audio Transcoding. Leave this checked for maximum compatibility, or uncheck it if you have an A/V receiver and want raw AC-3 passthrough for OTA channels.
- Appearance: Switch between Dark Theme (default) and Light Theme, and toggle enhanced metadata overlays.
External Apps
- Add custom deep links to launch external services directly from Feral HTPC. Select a service (Netflix, Disney+, YouTube, or Custom URI), provide a display title, and enter the specific deep link ID or URL.
Feral HTPC features a built-in web server that acts as a mobile remote control. It requires no app installation on your phone.
How to Connect:
- Open the Settings page in Feral HTPC.
- Locate the "Mobile Remote Control URL" (it will look something like
http://192.168.1.X:12345). - Ensure your smartphone is connected to the same Wi-Fi network as your HTPC.
- Open your smartphone's web browser and navigate to that URL.
Remote Features:
- Playback Controls: Play, pause, mute, volume adjustment, and closed caption toggling.
- Scrubbing: Hold the forward or backward buttons on the remote to visually scrub through the timeline of the currently playing media.
- Live Guide: Browse your channel collections and tap any active show to immediately tune to it on the HTPC.
- Movies & Apps: Browse your recorded movie library or launch your configured external streaming apps directly from your phone.
- Multi-view Control: Set up a Quad-view display and easily switch which quadrant's audio is currently active.
If you are using a standard keyboard or a generic media remote mapped to keyboard strokes, Feral HTPC supports the following global commands during playback:
- Enter / Space: Play / Pause
- Up / Down: Channel Up / Channel Down
- Left / Right: Rewind / Fast Forward (10-second intervals for Live TV, 30-second for Movies)
- F / F11: Toggle Fullscreen
- C: Toggle Closed Captions
- Escape / Backspace: Close the player / Return to the previous screen
- Media Keys: Play/Pause, Stop, Mute, Volume Up, Volume Down are natively supported.
- Cinematic Broadcast Deinterlacing: Implemented native YADIF deinterlacing across all raw TS streams and Time-Shift buffers. This completely eliminates the jagged "comb" artifacts commonly seen during fast motion on 1080i broadcast channels (such as CBS and NBC), bringing Feral HTPC's visual quality to parity with the official desktop VLC application.
- Progressive FFmpeg Proxy: Upgraded the local FFmpeg transcoding pipeline to actively blend and deinterlace (
-vf yadif) native 1080i streams before encoding. This ensures a pristine, progressive video feed is delivered to the player when "Force Local Transcode" is enabled. - Persistent Visual Quality: Engineered the Live TV seeking mechanism to dynamically preserve all deinterlacing and clock-sync overrides. Video quality and audio sync now remain perfectly intact even after scrubbing, rewinding, or fast-forwarding the timeline.
- Dynamic Audio Routing Scope: Resolved an internal compiler error in the playback initialization pipeline where the dynamic audio codec variable dropped out of scope before the proxy could execute.
- True Hardware Audio Passthrough (Bitstreaming): Added native support for sending raw 5.1 Dolby Digital (AC-3) surround sound directly to Audio/Video Receivers. The core engine now utilizes Windows Audio Session API (WASAPI) and SPDIF flags to bypass the Windows audio mixer for authentic home theater sound.
- Advanced OTA Signal Resiliency: Completely overhauled how Feral HTPC handles severely corrupted OTA broadcasts (such as local affiliates broadcasting broken timestamps). The player now utilizes aggressive LibVLC clock-sync overrides (
ts-trust-pcr=0, massive clock jitter buffers, and live audio up-sampling) to maintain perfect playback on direct TS streams without dropping audio or requiring an HLS transcode. - Smart Stereo Downmixing: The local FFmpeg proxy now actively detects 5.1 surround sound tracks (often used by major networks like CBS, ABC, and NBC) and safely downmixes them into 2.0 stereo when "Force AAC" is enabled, preventing silent audio failures.
- Optimized Closed Captions: Adjusted the default relative font size for subtitles so they render at a much more comfortable, cinematic scale on large 4K and 77" displays.
- Movie Playback Ghost Process: Fixed an issue where finishing a recorded movie while the main application was set to "Minimize on Play" would cause the application to remain invisibly running in the background. The main window now reliably restores and focuses itself when the video player closes.
- Proxy Initialization: Resolved an internal variable scoping issue that could prevent the local FFmpeg proxy from successfully receiving the target audio codec logic.
- Web Server Port Binding (Ghost Process Fix): Resolved a startup error (
Failed to bind to address / Address already in use) that prevented the mobile remote control server from launching. TheIsPortAvailablenetwork check was completely rewritten to use a passive system network table scan. This prevents sockets from getting temporarily locked in aTIME_WAITstate and accurately detects ports blocked by orphaned IPv6 background processes, allowing the app to successfully automatically roll over to the next available port. - Guide Modal Application Crash: Fixed a fatal application crash (
System.UriFormatException) that occurred when attempting to open the info modal for specific TV shows. The Channels DVR API occasionally provides relative image paths instead of full web addresses; the UI image loader has been updated to explicitly accept and safely handle both relative and absolute URIs. - Live TV Audio Timestamp Desync: Addressed an issue where VLC would drop the audio track and continuously play silence on certain OTA channels with corrupted or backward timestamps. Added the
:ts-trust-pcr=0initialization option to the native LibVLC media engine, forcing the player to calculate audio sync using raw presentation timestamps instead of relying on the often-inaccurate Program Clock Reference (PCR) from the broadcast feed.
- Episode Title On Guide: Added Episode Title to live TV data.
- Minimize on Play: Introduced a new playback preference allowing users to choose the behavior of the main application window when media launches. Users can now choose to minimize the base application to the Windows taskbar instead of completely hiding it.
- Fast-Scroll Guide Controls: Replaced standard scrollbars with dedicated vertical
RepeatButtoncontrols on the Live TV Guide. Users can single-click to jump down the guide, or hold the button for rapid, continuous scrolling that perfectly respects D-pad navigation.
- Smart Server Connection Logic: Completely overhauled how the application handles DVR server connections. If network auto-discovery fails (such as across different subnets or VLANs), all media pages will now automatically fall back to the last successfully saved IP address. Successful connections are also silently auto-saved for future sessions.
- Tuning Resiliency for TVE: Increased the underlying stream initialization timeout to 25 seconds to better accommodate slow-starting TV Everywhere (TVE) streams.
- Automatic Reconnection Loop: The video player now features an automatic retry mechanism. If a live stream drops or takes too long to spin up, the player will automatically attempt to reconnect up to 3 times before displaying a playback error.
- Global Cursor Override (Airspace Bug): Fixed a native WPF rendering issue where the mouse cursor would occasionally fail to hide during video playback, or would incorrectly remain hidden when moving the mouse to a secondary monitor. The cursor will now reliably disappear over active video and instantly restore when the player is closed or loses focus.
- Guide Page Focus Loss: Resolved an issue where enabling native scrollbars broke the D-pad focus tracking. The guide now smoothly translates coordinates to ensure the selected program block always remains visible on the screen.
Start Page |
Live TV |
TV Player |
Movies |
Movies Modal |
Movies Player |
Shows Page |
Episodes Page |
Episodes Player |
Multiview Setup |
Multiview Player |
Settings Page |
Apps Page |
Remote 1 |
Remote 2 |
Remote 3 |
Remote 4 |
Remote 5 |
Remote 6 |
Remote 7 |
Remote 8 |