I read up on it a bit and it does seem fairly safe. I read about the sources used, etc. I will post here if/when I install this and play around with it.
It definitely looks promising for anyone looking to cut the cord.
For anyone interested, the GitHub repo name that maintains the massive IPTV M3U playlists that are actually being used by the previously mentioned, four month old, still buggy, currently Mint repository exclusive app, is called "Free-IPTV".
The list is primarily maintained for the Kodi community, and given it's bog standard M3U files, can be used with
anything, including Kodi (which it's actually intended for and pretty easy to use and available on nearly all non-proprietary platforms), VLC, whatever IPTV app your TV/media center/device can run, and whatever else that can handle it down to networked toasters, I guess. No new OS needed just to use and explore, you can probably thumb through it right now on the very thing you're reading this post from with very little effort. Freedom of choice, and all that. It's also worth noting that not all streams contain metadata and scheduling, or parental controls with this list... in fact, most don't, and I've noticed over the years that a few of the poached streams from other services like Filmrise have occasionally shown hard R content, if it's a thing of concern. It's easily blocked in the Filmrise app, but not so much as a raw video feed. With regard to the foreign streaming broadcast TV content, be aware of broadcast decency laws and what time watershed is in those countries as well, if child filtering is of concern. There's also propaganda networks like Infowars randomly tossed in there, so it's safe to say there's not so much discernment and quality going into maintaining these lists so much as it just being a raw firehose of URLs, for better or worse.
This said, easily 85% of the stream addresses at least here in the United States, save for a few local channel feeds from around the country (quite a few are public access), are the same streams you can already get for free through Pluto/Redbox/Xumo/Stirr/Filmrise/RokuTV/etc., which is to say, hundreds of channels and still nothing to watch. The most interesting bits on the US feeds that I found were honestly C-SPAN and KTLA. Though they claim all feeds are "legal", there's clearly a lot of rebroadcasts that don't seem like they were intended to be publicly streamed online by the network in question, such as the Cozi feed out of West Virginia and the ThisTV feed from Kansas City (both broadcast substations that don't stream online like Comet and Stadium), though the ThisTV feed doesn't appear to be live, but a fragmented broken chunk of video. There's a lot of broken feeds in there, as well as what would likely classify as gray market feeds if legally challenged like the East Coast USA cable feed, even if they're not behind a login, or region locked. This isn't to say that they're all like that, though... a majority of them are actually legit, just uncoupled from the convenience of their standard app/website. It's also worth noting that the claim of 3000+ channels looks to be a tad over-inflated given the master playlist has a not insignificant number of duplicate and triplicate feeds for the same streaming channel from competing free streaming services. The most odd omission from this supposed master list has to be
Love Nature, one of the few live streaming channels that's actually halfway decent.
Personally, I wouldn't bother with it if you already have a smart TV or Roku and an antenna, as there's very little there that you can't already get, unless you want to jam on foreign language broadcasts to sharpen your non-primary language skills. And given the price and power draw of a Roku these days, there's really no sense in using that IPTV M3U playlist given most of the US streams are pulled from apps that actually already have a live TV guide built into the front end.
This said, if anyone's actually looking to repurpose an old computer for an HTPC, look into
LibreELEC as it would be a far better geared distro for doing entertainment streaming as it's built to run lean with only the system files necessary to run Kodi which also gives you a 10 foot user interface out of the box, and is compiled for a whole mess of platforms, from generic x86 to Pi and a lot inbetween.
Edited only to remove a link and add details about potential content and age restriction issues.
