My M3U playlist will not load

Start with the playlist status

In the panel, every playlist shows its sync status. An error and a warning are not the same thing, and telling them apart saves you looking in the wrong place.

Cause 1: the provider returns no channels

By far the most common. The message is "The provider returned no channels. Check the URL or the credentials". It means the request reached something, but what came back held no channels. The usual reasons:

• The subscription or trial has expired. Rule this out first.
• The provider changed domain. This happens often, and the old URL stops responding or returns an error page.
• Xtream credentials are correct but IP-locked, or the provider has invalidated them.
• The URL does not point at a playlist but at a web page. If opening it in a browser shows a page rather than downloading a text file, it is not an M3U playlist.

The quickest check: paste the URL into a browser. A valid M3U playlist starts with #EXTM3U and either displays as plain text or downloads. Anything else — an error page, a login form, a JSON message — explains the failure by itself.

Cause 2: the request times out

Chlyra TV waits up to 60 seconds for your provider’s server to respond. Past that, the import is cut off. This tends to happen with very large playlists or with servers under load at peak hours.

What to do: retry later. If it always fails at the same time of day, that is provider congestion and there is nothing to change on this side. If your playlist has tens of thousands of channels and you can ask your provider for a reduced version, that is the real fix: a smaller playlist imports faster and is far easier to handle on a TV.

Cause 3: you have hit the connection limit

Nearly all providers cap how many simultaneous connections one account allows. If you are watching a channel on the TV and syncing on the phone at the same time, you may be using up both of the connections you have.

You can recognise it because it fails intermittently: sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, without you changing anything. Close the player on your other devices and try again.

Cause 4: the playlist loads but channels are missing

Here the status is OK, so nothing failed. There are three possible reasons, and they are worth knowing because they look like a bug and are not:

1. Channels with an unsupported URLChlyra TV imports channels whose address starts with http or https. If your playlist carries channels with rtmp://, rtsp:// or relative paths, those are skipped on import. That is deliberate: they are formats the player cannot open, and keeping them would only produce channels that fail when you press them.
2. Only live channels are importedWith Xtream Codes, Chlyra TV imports the live channel list. Films and series your provider offers do not count towards that total, so the number can look lower than you expected.
3. The playlist exceeded 200,000 channelsThere is a cap of 200,000 channels per playlist. If yours carries more, the first 200,000 are imported and you get a warning telling you how many it had in total. The cap exists for a practical reason: one playlist once carried over a million channels, and that makes search and the guide slow on any device.

If you use an M3U URL

• Check the URL is complete, including the http:// or https:// at the start.
• Be careful copying it from an email or a message: some clients truncate it or append invisible characters at the end.
• If you typed it by hand with a TV remote, check it character by character. Better still: use QR code scanning and skip the problem entirely.
• If your provider gave you an unencrypted http:// URL it will still work, but it is worth asking for the https version if they have one.

If you use Xtream Codes

• The server address goes without a trailing slash and with nothing after it: just the domain and, if there is one, the port.
• Username and password are case-sensitive.
• If you copy and paste, watch for spaces at the start or end. It is the silliest failure and the most common.
• If your provider gave you both an M3U URL and Xtream credentials, try Xtream: it carries more information and reconnects better when something changes.

Related questions

Why did it work yesterday and not today?

Most likely the subscription expired or the provider changed domain. Neither leaves any trace in the player: the URL is still the same, there is simply something different answering at the other end.

Why does it load on the phone but not on the TV?

If your configuration is synced to your account, the playlist is exactly the same on both, so the playlist is not the problem. The two usual causes are the provider’s simultaneous connection limit, and the TV being on a different network or using a DNS that blocks the source domain.

How long does a playlist take to import?

From a few seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on size. If you have several playlists they are processed two at a time and the rest queue. You will see the Syncing status meanwhile; you do not have to stay on the screen.

Will I lose my favourites if I add the playlist again?

Favourites are tied to that playlist’s channels. If you delete the playlist and create it again, new channels are created and you have to redo them. If what you want is to refresh the content, use Sync rather than deleting and re-adding.