Plugins

Channel Mapparr

Version: 1.26.2911354 Author: PiratesIRC Last Updated: Oct 18 2026, 14:29 UTC

Standardizes broadcast (OTA) and premium/cable channel names using network data and channel lists. Supports M3U stream import, category organization, and fuzzy matching across about 42,600 channels in 13 countries.

Downloads

Latest Release

Download: channel-mapparr-latest.zip
Built: Oct 18 2026, 14:30 UTC
Source Commit: 1025b6f

Checksums:

MD5:    05e2e51c8519fd4cee0abd3e1191d34a
SHA256: 9fc5b90b11ee4f1dd77b62796ec19d107aabd63ff57ae1008b5ec691f3f715cb

All Versions

Version	Download	Built	Commit	MD5	SHA256
`1.26.2911354`	Download	Oct 18 2026, 14:30 UTC	`1025b6f`	05e2e51c8519fd4cee0abd3e1191d34a	9fc5b90b11ee4f1dd77b62796ec19d107aabd63ff57ae1008b5ec691f3f715cb
`1.26.2901846`	Download	Oct 17 2026, 21:57 UTC	`763fa0a`	28d3958a01c9d85a51ac4e0a4ca008f1	3a7d8a14c94bc1b0d179651558f4c6fa00909f44d10976aa441b1c417a97f0f2
`1.26.2901605`	Download	Oct 17 2026, 16:15 UTC	`5741478`	e8fa75b12edc80ca5e0224e61a5fc7e0	612b1790cf29f93902add1878ff4c27cf3ac9887a29baeb6bbc4877c5539661d
`1.26.2881225`	Download	Oct 15 2026, 12:43 UTC	`2e4d8a9`	df503d0bca03c1cf4b3f5aea6f1d4ec2	5014961f5d8c6834b00a276e1422be4674eb45916e11fcfcd3397df0e9e0884e
`1.26.2840039`	Download	Oct 11 2026, 00:45 UTC	`f2c9af3`	d48c1dafb1d5460221d7f6631e6e1347	e2d45292add8312bccf6d95e5e08c66940fc9b5e2797507247c61d879c6d5474
`1.26.2832116`	Download	Oct 10 2026, 21:22 UTC	`946dc08`	2a059d2d1e503648e56924fb96905f07	02462e8be15eba5bce651b6befcdee17c3c39945618e18d8bb8eefde607d6f1f
`1.26.2481147`	Download	Sep 05 2026, 17:24 UTC	`ffc025f`	2b618f3b86c63621911ebae1eb43924c	9953f5f0364d96207c5864a1ef12759ca19b9c0c3e4fb07bc9414b76aa478fb4
`1.26.2291823`	Download	Aug 17 2026, 23:39 UTC	`f12b615`	e73db45b7c6a29be4a5fb1407fa56312	e51b802391b0f3f8e2e3f0fbbc9360f265970c3fdc1279cc0af297be86126ac1
`1.26.2241315`	Download	Aug 12 2026, 18:50 UTC	`e745323`	f28e5f90e155131fc07c5dd622b43ece	e992a3b732d4659e1dbff54ca0f8fb3b3d25bcde9b738b958086f2d172a5b222
`1.26.2241232`	Download	Aug 12 2026, 17:54 UTC	`00843e4`	cf88a109918ce86f3df460dceeea71ee	77a4fefcb8c7f883fac7d792f3d5b59d35057b4faa709c3af52607bcbd1d1e06

Maintainers: PiratesIRC

Source: Browse Plugin

Metadata: View full manifest

Plugin README

A Dispatcharr plugin that standardizes broadcast (OTA) and premium/cable channel names using network data and curated channel lists. It reads thirteen country databases and can also organise channels into groups, import M3U streams and create channels from streams.

[!TIP] New to Dispatcharr plugins? Start with the Dispatcharr Plugin Workflow guide. It explains what each plugin and tool does, where they overlap, and what order to use them in.

What it does

Naming

Broadcast (OTA) station matching for United States local affiliates, by callsign, against a bundled 6,839-station table built from the Federal Communications Commission licensing database. ABC 5 (WEWS) CLEVELAND HD becomes ABC - OH Cleveland (WEWS). Subchannels resolve to their own network, and callsigns that are also ordinary English words are handled without false positives.
Customizable name format using {NETWORK}, {STATE}, {CITY} and {CALLSIGN}.
Curated channel databases for 13 countries: AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, MX, NL, NO, PL, UK, US.
Suffix for unmatched channels, so what did not match is easy to find later.

Matching

A four-stage pipeline: a 200-entry alias map, then exact, then substring, then fuzzy token matching. The alias stage resolves common variants such as FNC to Fox News Channel without any scoring.
Four sensitivity presets, from Relaxed to Exact.
False-positive guards that stop BBC One matching BBC Two, ESPN 1 matching ESPN 2, and ABC News matching BBC News.
Provider-junk normalization: stylized Unicode, emoji used as letters, resolution markers, bouquet tags and country prefixes are all removed before matching. Plain ASCII names are left untouched.
Non-Latin script support: Cyrillic, CJK and Arabic names are preserved rather than reduced to nothing.
Fast: token-based pre-filtering matches 19,000 streams against 31,000 channels in seconds.

Organizing

Category-based grouping: move channels into groups by content category.
M3U stream import: create channels from streams, organized by category, in the background.
Scoping: process only named groups, or exclude groups with wildcard patterns. A pattern matching nothing refuses the run rather than silently processing everything.
Logos: one default logo in bulk, or per-channel artwork fuzzy-matched against the tv-logo/tv-logos repository.

Seeing what happened

Dry Run Mode: every mutating action writes a CSV of what it would have done, and changes nothing.
Show Status: live progress and estimated time for the running or most recent operation.
Emailed reports: optionally email each run as an HTML page and/or a CSV, delivered by the Newsflasharr plugin. Off by default. The emailed report never contains your M3U source names, which the CSV exports do carry in their settings header, and channel names are also scrubbed of M3U account names and IP addresses. The HTML page opens as an index with its table in a collapsed section, and sorts by clicking a column heading. Newsflasharr’s own Show Status action shows how many reports this plugin has built.

See the user guide for how to use these, and for every setting.

The emailed report

The page opens as an index: the logo beside the title, a summary card of the run, then one section headed Results carrying its row count, which starts collapsed.

A Channel Mapparr rename preview report as it opens: the logo beside the title, a summary card listing plugin version, generation time, databases loaded, dry-run state, match sensitivity and row count, and below it a single collapsed section headed Results with a row count of 6

Click that heading and the table appears.

The same report with the Results section expanded, showing a sortable table of channel name, proposed name, match type and score for six sample channels

Sample data, shown here in dark mode; the page follows whichever theme your reader uses. Click any column heading to sort by it; numeric columns are compared as numbers, so channel 18 sorts before 31 rather than after 102. The plugin settings that name your M3U sources are deliberately absent from this page.

Requirements

Dispatcharr v0.20.0+
Internet access, only for Apply Per-Channel Logos (tv-logos), which fetches the logo file list from GitHub. The anonymous usage counts report (see below) also needs it, and it never blocks a run. Every other action works without it. The plugin no longer checks for its own updates.
The Newsflasharr plugin, only if you want emailed reports. It is what actually sends the mail. Channel Mapparr does not require it: with Newsflasharr absent or disabled, nothing is sent and nothing fails.

Installation

Log in to Dispatcharr’s web UI.
Navigate to Plugins.
Click Import Plugin and upload the plugin zip file.
Enable the plugin after installation.

Upgrading from an earlier version has its own short procedure: see Updating the plugin.

Anonymous usage counts

The Channels Renamed and Active Installs badges count every install that leaves the “Share anonymous usage counts” setting (on by default) ticked and runs at least one action. Channels Renamed counts one for each channel whose name this plugin changes, by either Rename Channels or Tag Unknown Channels. A channel renamed again later, by either action, counts again. A run that changes no name counts nothing, and a preview or a Dry Run counts nothing. Organize by Category, the logo actions, Import M3U Streams and Create Channels From Streams are not counted. A rename you later undo by hand still counts, because the count is of renames made, not of channels that carry a changed name today. The count starts at zero on every install. There is no earlier record, so renames made before this version are not counted.

When an action finishes, the plugin sends this plugin’s Channels Renamed total and a random id for this plugin on this install to the plugin author’s counter at plugin-stats.dpas.workers.dev. It sends at most once an hour after a successful send, or ten minutes after the last successful send when a run has just renamed channels. There is no timer: a run that finishes inside the gap sends nothing, and the next action that finds the gap passed sends the total.

The server stores that id with the total and the date of the last report, and keeps them until this install unticks the setting and the delete succeeds, or until the plugin author removes them by hand. An install that stops reporting still counts toward Channels Renamed. The connection shows the server your public IP address; the server uses it only to limit abuse and does not store it in its database, though when an install first registers it keeps a salted one-way hash of it (of its /64 block for IPv6) for up to three days. Cloudflare, which hosts the server, keeps its own request logs. No channel names, group names, URLs, providers or settings are sent. The figures are self-reported by installs and capped by the server, not verified.

What counts as an active install: an install that sent at least one report in the last 30 UTC days. A badge changes after the server’s hourly recount, which runs at the start of each UTC hour, and Shields may cache the badge for up to an hour more, so a new report can take up to about two hours to show.

The setting is the last one in the settings form, in its own section. Unticking it takes effect when the next action finishes; the plugin then asks the server to delete this install’s figures. Once the server confirms the delete, the plugin forgets its id, and ticking the setting again later starts a new one; if the delete could not reach the server, the plugin keeps the id and retries. The plugin keeps that id and the timing of its reports in /data/plugin_stats/channel-mapparr/ (install_id, sent, backoff, disabled, delete_backoff, lock). To start a new id, untick the setting and let an action run so the server deletes this install’s figures; deleting that folder while the setting is ticked, or before the server confirms the delete, leaves the old figures on the server, and the new id then sends the full total again, so the badge counts it twice.

Documentation

Document	What it covers
User guide	Step-by-step walkthroughs: a first run, scoping which channels are touched, how OTA names are built, and setting up emailed reports end to end.
Changelog	What changed between versions, and why.
Development notes	How the plugin is put together and how to run the tests.
Open work	Known gaps and planned improvements.

Disclaimer

Channel Mapparr provides no television content of any kind. It supplies no channels, no playlists, no streams, no electronic programme guide data and no provider accounts, and it contains no list of where to obtain any of those. It renames and organizes channel entries that already exist in your Dispatcharr installation, matching them against bundled reference data: curated per-country channel lists and a table of United States broadcast station callsigns published by the Federal Communications Commission.

The plugin never contacts a media provider. It never opens, fetches, decodes, records, restreams or redistributes any stream. It reads stream names to match them, and never the streams themselves. The outbound connections it makes are to GitHub, only when you run Apply Per-Channel Logos, which fetches a public list of logo filenames, and a small usage report at most once an hour (ten minutes after the last successful send when a run has just renamed channels), which you can turn off (see Anonymous usage counts). Emailed reports, if you enable them, are handed to the Newsflasharr plugin, which sends them to destinations you configured.

You are responsible for what you connect Dispatcharr to. Whether a particular provider, subscription, playlist or stream is lawful for you to use depends on your agreement with that provider and on the law where you live. Use only sources you are authorised to use. Nothing in this project is intended to enable, encourage or assist access to content you have no right to access.

All product names, channel names, network names, callsigns, trademarks and registered trademarks mentioned in this project or appearing in its examples or bundled reference data are the property of their respective owners. This project is an independent, community-built plugin. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any television network, broadcaster, streaming service or IPTV provider, and it is not affiliated with the Dispatcharr project beyond being a plugin written for it.

License

This plugin integrates with Dispatcharr’s plugin system and follows its licensing terms.

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