iptvnator/docs/architecture/vod-multi-source.md

VOD Multi-Source

Finds the same movie in the user's other imported playlists, lets them switch which one it streams from without losing the timecode, and turns the playback-error screen into a recovery point.

The point is not choice for its own sake — it is rescuing a viewing when the current source is dead, serves an unsupported codec, or buffers badly.

Scope (v1)

Source types	Xtream ↔ Xtream only
Content	Movies only — series are not offered a source chip
Environment	Electron only — the chip renders nothing in the PWA
Auto-failover	Opt-in, off by default (Settings.vodAutoFailover); offered only on the built-in web players
Pin scope	Per movie (a global portal priority is out of scope)
Stream probe	HEAD → reachable + latency, sent with the playlist's own playback headers. No codec probing

Stalker never reaches the content table (it would need a live authenticated get_ordered_list&search= per portal), and M3U playlists are stored as a JSON blob whose search path forces content_type: 'live'. Both are additive later without changing the contracts — VodSourceCandidate.portalType already carries 'xtream' | 'stalker' | 'm3u' and discovery sits behind a service interface.

A probe answer is cached per request, not per URL: two playlists can share a stream URL and require different headers, and one of them answering 403 says nothing about the other.

ffprobe/ffmpeg are not dependencies of this app and are not bundled, so provenance: 'probe' means reachability and latency only. There is deliberately no feature flag for codec probing: it would gate a code path with no binary behind it.

The honesty rule

This is the part to preserve if anything here is refactored.

Every metadata value carries where it came from:

provenance	produced by	rendered as
api	get_vod_info — container, codec, audio, dimensions	plain tag
parsed	regex over the title/filename	tag prefixed ~, warn colour
probe	HEAD → reachable + latency (retried as a ranged GET when the server answers 405/501, since plenty serve media over GET while refusing HEAD)	ok / fail status tag
absent	—	no tag at all + a check chip

Three rules follow, and each is enforced in code rather than by convention:

1. A guess never ranks. factualOnly() (libs/portal/shared/data-access/.../vod-source-metadata.util.ts) is the only sanctioned accessor for ranking and failover decisions, and parsed values are structurally unreachable through it. A filename claiming 4K cannot outrank a source that was actually reached.
2. Unknown is not "unavailable". VodSourceProbeStatus separates fail (contacted and refused) from unknown (timed out, blocked by the redirect policy, or no probe capability). A probe returning HTTP status 0 maps to unknown; the UI keeps offering a check and never shows the source as dead.
3. Empty beats wrong. Quality is derived from pixel width, because letterboxed masters are cropped vertically — a 2.39:1 1080p film is 1920×800, and 800 alone is indistinguishable from a 1280×800 encode. With no width, a height is trusted only within 5% of a standard frame height; otherwise no tag is emitted. Below the HD widths the ranges stop working: 800×600 and 800×450 are neither 480p nor each other, and 720 wide is NTSC 480p or PAL 576p depending only on the height. Those formats are therefore matched rather than bucketed, and an unrecognised shape returns nothing rather than a label that would be published as an api fact. A known height still has to be consistent with the match: cropping only ever removes lines, so a shorter frame is a letterboxed master of that format, while a taller one (640×480 against 640×360) is a different shape and gets no tag.

Provenance is per-field and changes over time: at discovery a row has only parsed tags, because the content table stores no container, codec or audio. Facts arrive when the source is resolved.

Architecture

VOD details page (Xtream)
  └── VodMultiSourceHostService          component-provided, one per open movie
        ├── VodMultiSourceController     session state + failover ranking
        ├── VodSourceDiscoveryService ──► DB_FIND_TITLE_SOURCES (trigram FTS)
        ├── VodSourceResolverService  ──► foreign playlist creds → get_vod_info
        │                                  → constructVodUrl
        ├── VodSourcePinService       ──► DB_GET/SET/CLEAR_VOD_SOURCE_PIN
        └── StreamProbeService        ──► STREAM_PROBE_URL (main process)

VodMultiSourceHostService is component-provided, never root-provided: the controller's "each source is tried at most once" set must die with the movie, or a later film inherits a poisoned failover history.

VodMultiSourceController is a plain class, not a service, for the same reason — and so its ranking logic is testable without TestBed.

Ownership

Concern	Location
DTOs, match key	libs/shared/interfaces/src/lib/vod-source*.ts
Pin table	libs/shared/database/src/lib/vod-source-pins.schema.ts
Discovery SQL	apps/electron-backend/.../operations/title-sources.operations.ts
Pin CRUD	apps/electron-backend/.../operations/vod-source-pin.operations.ts
Probe handler	apps/electron-backend/src/app/events/stream-probe.ts
Discovery / resolve / rank	libs/portal/shared/data-access/src/lib/multi-source/
Probe + pin clients	libs/services/src/lib/{stream-probe,vod-source-pin}.service.ts
Row / popover / chip	libs/ui/components/src/lib/vod-sources/
Page wiring	libs/portal/xtream/feature/src/lib/vod-details/vod-multi-source-*.ts

One picker, two places, two counts

The chip on the action row and the chip in the inline player's now-playing bar are the same component, so both are handed the same matchKind and the same vodAutoFailover value and both write the setting back. A copy that rendered the toggle off while it was on — and did nothing when flipped — would be worse than not offering it.

The two numbers around it are deliberately different, because their sentences are: the chip says "Sources N" and counts alternative streams, while the caption says "also found in N other playlists" and counts distinct playlists (alternativePlaylistCount). The popover groups a portal's three copies of a film under that one portal, so counting rows there would contradict the list the caption invites the user to open.

Identity

Provider ids cannot key a pin — the same film has a different stream_id in every portal, which is the problem being solved. buildVodSourceMatchKey() produces tmdb:{id} when a usable TMDB id exists, otherwise title:{normalizedBase}:{year} via the shared normalizeTitleKeys.

Enrichment adds BOTH identifying fields late, so the same movie can already be pinned under any poorer form of itself:

pinned when	stored under
after enrichment	tmdb:{id}
before the TMDB id	title:{base}:{year}
before the year too	title:{base}:

buildVodSourceMatchKeyCandidates returns all three, most-trusted first. Reading every alias is what keeps a late TMDB id from orphaning an earlier pin.

Three key sets, because reading, writing and deleting are different questions (pinKeysFor builds all three so they cannot disagree):

set	contents	why
lookup	every alias above	a pin may sit under any poorer form of the movie
write	tmdb: + title:{base}:{year}	keys that name exactly ONE film
loaded	the key the pin on screen came from	the only ambiguous row this session may retire

A write stores the canonical key and clears the stale ones — both halves matter, and each rules out the other's shortcut:

• Writing only the top key would leave the lower-trust aliases pointing at whatever was pinned before, and a reopen that reads one of those (enrichment has not landed, or its request failed) starts the source the user replaced.
• Writing the decision into every alias is not the fix either: the yearless form is shared by every remake, so a known-year pin stored there would answer for a different film — pin Dune (2021), open Dune (1984) before its year arrives, and it starts the 2021 source.

A write stores the new key before retiring the old rows. The other order destroys the stored preference and can then fail to replace it, leaving nothing persisted while the row still shows the old pin; lookups are most-trusted-first, so a leftover alias never outranks the key just written.

The pin a rediscovery reads is applied immediately, not after its source lookup returns: holding that snapshot across the await lets it overwrite a pin the user makes in the meantime, leaving the row and the primary Play naming a source the database no longer holds. Applying it first makes the later write simply win.

For the same reason a write or an unpin never deletes the yearless alias on spec: that row may hold another remake's preference. The single exception is the row this session actually read, because the user is acting on the pin they can see — and leaving that one would make an unpin come back.

The row only changes once the write lands. A pin the database refused is worse than no pin at all — the icon promises the preference will be there next time, and it will not be — so togglePinnedSource reports "nothing happened" and the controller is left exactly as it was.

Rediscovery vs. a new session

Two keys, deliberately, because the host has two different questions to answer when enrichment lands:

• vodMultiSourceMovieKey covers title, year and TMDB id. Enrichment changing any of them re-runs discovery — that is how a yearless search gets its year and a tmdb:-keyed pin becomes findable.
• vodMultiSourceSessionKey is playlistId:contentId — the film itself. It is what decides whether that rerun is a refresh or a new session.

A refresh keeps the controller: the source the user switched to stays active (with the facts its resolve produced, rather than the catalog's guesses), the tried set stays burned, the live position stays, and a switch already in flight still commits. Rebuilding there would take the film off the source it is actually streaming, and hand failover a clean slate for sources it has already spent. Only a different film resets — including the tried set, which is what makes failover terminate.

A rerun can also legitimately drop the playing row: the year the enrichment supplies makes the year gate reject a copy the yearless search had admitted ("Dune" 1984 while watching the 2021 film). Off the list is right — it is not the same film. Off the screen is not, so applyDiscoveredSources keeps it as a row and leaves it active; a caption naming a playlist that is not streaming anything would be a lie about the one thing this feature exists to state.

What the queries are allowed to miss

A source that exists but is never read is indistinguishable, to the user, from one that does not exist — the chip simply does not appear. So:

• The current playlist is excluded in SQL, not afterwards. It routinely lists a film in several categories, and those rows would otherwise spend the FTS window before a single other playlist was read.

• Duplicates collapse in SQL too, for the same reason. One playlist can list a film in dozens of categories, and those rows rank identically, so GROUP BY cat.playlist_id, c.xtream_id runs before the limit. Collapsing them only in TypeScript afterwards cannot recover the playlists the window never reached.

• Short titles scan on a word boundary, and take no window at all. The trigram tokenizer cannot index tokens under three characters, so "Up", "It" or "Us" produce an empty MATCH and fall back to a scan. A substring scan matches "Titanic" and "The Italian Job" for "It", so the scan asks for the token as a word (' ' || LOWER(title) || ' ' GLOB '*[^a-z0-9]it[^a-z0-9]*') and orders by title length (a match is the title plus decoration: "IT (2017) 1080p").

  The FTS path keeps its 60-row window because it ranks by relevance — the best rows are the ones it keeps. A scan cannot rank, so a window there would silently decide which valid sources the user may see, and it would not even buy anything: the GLOB cannot use an index, so SQLite reads every row either way and a LIMIT saves transfer, not work. What bounds the scan instead is its predicate: reaching it means NO token cleared the trigram minimum — a one-or-two-character title like "It", but also an all-short multiword one like "I Am" — and EVERY token must then appear as a word. Matching on the first token alone would return most of a large catalog for the confirmation pass to discard, which on the single database worker is real blocking.

  Like the LIKE it replaces it compares ASCII-lowercased text, so a non-ASCII short title is no better and no worse served than before.

Both remain necessary-not-sufficient filters: the two-tier normalized confirmation still runs afterwards, so the looser query never admits "Upgrade" for "Up".

One row inside the excluded playlist is kept when the caller names it (keepContentId): a pin can point at another copy of the film in the playlist being viewed, and dropping that row would leave the preference pointing at nothing. The host therefore reads the pin BEFORE discovery. When that pin is the route's own row, the kept copy and currentSourceRow() are the same stream, so applyDiscoveredSources drops the duplicate rather than listing it twice.

Same title, different film

The year gate applies to both match tiers, not just the year-stripped one. normalizeTitleKeys strips bracketed segments wholesale — they usually hold quality and language tags — so "Dune (1984)" and "Dune" normalize to the same string and the exact tier would accept the remake without ever consulting a year, ranked above every fuzzy match. Discovery reads a bracketed year out of the raw title first, and when both sides state a year and they disagree, it is not the same movie. An unknown year still never blocks.

Why resolution is lazy

The content table stores no container_extension, and XtreamUrlService.constructVodUrl returns '' without one. A discovered source is therefore not playable from the database — every alternative costs one live get_vod_info against a foreign playlist's credentials, which can fail offline, on an expired account, or behind Cloudflare.

So: rows render instantly from the FTS match with parsed provenance, and a URL is resolved only when the user clicks play, pins, or checks. Containers are memoised per (playlistId, streamId) for the session, and a container learned earlier is reused if the portal later goes unreachable. Resolution is never fanned out on page load.

Switching without losing the timecode

Every playback host renders @if (inlinePlayback(); as playback), so re-set()ing that signal with a new {streamUrl, startTime} swaps the source in place — the player component, WebPlayerView and the engine all survive, and WebPlayerViewComponent's effect rebuilds the source and clears the diagnostic.

Three details make the position survive:

• The carried position is the live one. handleInlineTimeUpdate reports to VodMultiSourceHostService.reportPosition() before the 15-second persistence throttle, so a switch does not rewind by up to 15 seconds. External players have no timeupdate at all, so for them the polled playback_positions value IS the live one and is reported directly — seeding it would freeze the resume point where playback started.
• It is a single .set(), never null then set — a null in between would destroy the player subtree and lose the engine.
• playback_positions is keyed (playlistId, contentXtreamId, contentType), so a switch changes the key. The resolved playback carries the new source's contentInfo, and that source's row takes over.

The position also has to exist before anything plays. Nothing reports a live one until the first timeupdate, so a pinned source started straight off the Resume button would resolve at zero and restart the film. The controller is therefore seeded from the persisted position (seedResumeSeconds), one-way: once a live position exists it wins, because the stored one lags it by up to the save throttle and applying it would visibly rewind.

A resuming engine can emit a timeupdate at ~0 before it finishes seeking. VodDetailsPlaybackService guards this with a one-shot resumeSettled latch — a filter would have broken deliberate seek-backwards. The latch also releases when the target is out of reach: switching a two-hour position into a 90-minute cut means the engine can never report it, and waiting would suppress every save for the rest of the session. handleInlineTimeUpdate returns that verdict and the route feeds multi-source the startTime it asked for until the engine gets there, so a switch or a failure during the initial seek does not resolve the next source at zero and restart the film. One latch serves both, because two would eventually disagree.

Failover

Only fires when Settings.vodAutoFailover is on, and it first awaits a discovery still in flight — a stream can fail faster than SQLite answers, and concluding "nowhere to go" against an empty controller would strand the user on the error screen with alternatives landing a moment later. stillOwnsScreen() does that wait and then re-checks the session, because the user can navigate during it and the controller afterwards may belong to a different film; the pinned-Play path takes the same wait, or a persisted pin would lose to worker latency. Ranking (pickFailoverTarget):

1. never tried this session — a hard filter, not a preference
2. probed reachable; probed failing is penalised
3. not known to have failed recently
4. richer factual metadata (via factualOnly)
5. exact title match over fuzzy

Termination is structural: triedSourceIds only ever grows within a session, so an N-source movie fails over at most N−1 times and then shows the honest error screen. Returning to an earlier source by hand does not clear the set.

Selection is not an attempt. setActiveSource only selects; markPlaying also spends the source's turn, and only the three places that really start playback call it — a switch, the route's own Play/Resume, and restoring the playing row after a rediscovery. Discovery selects the route's row the moment the page opens, and a pin or the picker can select an alternative before anything plays; counting those would let a later failure skip a healthy fallback, or call the options exhausted with one untouched. runFailover then retires whatever is on screen before picking, so the source that just failed is spent however it got there — one hole per start path would be an infinite ping-pong between two sources.

A source that cannot even be resolved is marked tried without becoming active, and failover continues to the next candidate rather than giving up — production calls failover() only once, on the original failure, so stopping at a dead top-ranked source would strand every healthy one below it. switchTo therefore reports which of two things happened: unresolvable (marked tried, keep going) or superseded (something newer owns the screen, stop). Without that distinction the loop would spin on a superseded target forever, because only the first outcome marks the candidate tried.

A pin is not decoration. The primary Play action starts from the pinned source when one is set, and the pin outranks every other signal in the ranking above. Loading a pin that only decorated its row would mean "make this the main source" survived a restart as an icon and nothing else.

The switch is always announced — another source can carry a different dub or cut. The toast offers Undo, and adds a dub warning when audioDiffersFactually() is true, which requires both sides to state an audio track as fact. Two guesses, or a guess against a fact, stay silent.

Web engines only (HTML5/hls.js, Video.js, ArtPlayer). Embedded MPV suppresses shared diagnostics and owns its own error block; external MPV/VLC are fire-and-forget with no error channel back.

External players and an alternative source

A switch goes through the same inline-vs-external fork a normal Play takes, so with MPV or VLC configured the alternative opens in the external player — and that session carries the OTHER playlist's ids. matchedExternalPlayback would disown it: the primary button never became Stop, stopping found no session, and another click opened a second player. The page therefore claims a session that matches either the route's own stream or the alternative multi-source says is active (VodDetailsPlaybackBindings.activeSource).

ownsContent() answers that question once, for both consumers: the session matcher AND the playback-position bridge. They cannot be allowed to disagree — a page that shows a Stop button for a session whose progress it discards keeps the resume point at wherever playback began, so a switch an hour later rewinds the whole session.

The caption itself appears only while a player is actually running — inline or a matched external session, and not while a playback diagnostic is up. Discovery marks a source active as the page opens, so gating on that alone would have the page claim "Playing from …" before Play was pressed, after the player was closed, and over the error screen for a stream that would not play.

Whichever source ends up playing, the "playing" badge follows it: starting the route's own stream (Play, Resume, Restart, or the fallback after a pin does not apply) hands the badge back to the route row, or the picker and caption go on naming an alternative that is no longer running. That hand-back also invalidates a switch still resolving — the user chose the route stream, and an older resolution arriving afterwards would replace what they just asked for. And a source started through the picker or a pin is recorded in Recently Viewed exactly as an ordinary Play is — it is the same film, watched.

Stop then has to win over the pin. The primary action consults the pin first — that is what makes "make this the main source" decide where playback starts — but when a session is already running the same button reads Stop, and doing anything other than stopping would launch a second player while the first kept going.

PWA

Discovery, foreign-playlist reads, the pin table and the probe are all main-process. A browser HEAD to an arbitrary IPTV host is CORS-blocked, and no-cors yields an opaque response where 200, 403 and 404 are indistinguishable — so the PWA cannot answer these questions honestly rather than merely lacking a convenience.

Every entry point is gated on a bridge typeof check (isAvailable), matching CatalogTitleMatchService. In the PWA the chip renders nothing and the auto-failover setting is hidden.

Resuming a pinned copy

Playback positions are keyed by (playlist, stream), so a pinned alternative carries its own. playPinned looks that position up and applies it — and applies zero when the lookup comes back empty, because the controller is still holding the ROUTE copy's position at that moment. Carrying it across would drop the user into the middle of a film they never started here, and the first save would write that timecode under the pinned source's key.

When no lookup function is supplied at all, nothing is applied: "never watched" was never established, so there is nothing to correct.

What the primary button describes

Two position signals, not one. vodPlaybackPosition is the LAST position seen — whichever copy produced it — and feeds the progress bar and the switch handoff. routePlaybackPosition is the route copy's own row, and everything that acts on the route's stream reads that: Resume, its label, its timecode. Collapsing them lets an alternative's progress resume the route copy at a timecode nobody reached in it. Route reuse (the Similar rail) clears both, so the button cannot describe the previous movie while the new lookup is still in flight, and every route start — including the primary button's fall-through past an unresolvable pin — goes through the route's own wrappers, which replace whatever timecode an alternative left in the controller.

While the pinned copy is the one playing, its live position wins over the row that was stored before this session started.

A pin means the button plays a copy the page did not load a position for. A watched-through copy resolves to zero rather than its stored seconds, through the same isResumablePosition rule the label uses — otherwise the button reads Play and then seeks back to where the film ended. Restart follows the pin for the same reason: with Resume honouring a pinned copy, a Restart that started the route copy would silently switch the user's playlist. createPrimaryActionPosition therefore looks that copy's row up and lets it govern the label, the timecode and the Restart affordance — including when the lookup comes back empty, because "never watched" is an answer: the button must read Play, not Resume 42:18 on a stream that starts at zero. A pin on the route's own row changes nothing; the loaded position already IS that copy's.

Provider codec metadata

info.video / info.audio come back in two shapes: the declared string array (['H.264'], which the mock server and many panels send) and the ffprobe object carrying codec_name/width/height. readStreamInfo accepts both — reading only the object silently lost the codec on every array response, and with it the "dub may differ" warning, which compares stated audio tracks.

Switching sources through startResolvedPlayback closes a matched external session first. It REPLACES what is playing — with MPV or VLC and instance reuse off, the backend would otherwise spawn a second detached player, leaving both sources running and Stop owning only the newer one.

Claims about the present

isActive means "the source a switch or Play would use" — selection, not playback. pinnedSourceAwaitingPlay therefore takes playbackLive as well: a pinned row stays selected after its player is closed, and skipping the pin on selection alone would send the next Play to the route copy. Discovery sets it the moment the page opens, and it survives closing the player — so it cannot, on its own, back a statement in the present tense.

VodDetailsRouteComponent.playbackLive is that statement. Inline, it needs a timeupdate: inlinePlayback() is only the REQUEST to play, non-null while the engine is still opening the stream and still non-null after it fails, while a timeupdate is the engine reporting frames. External, it needs the session past launching. Every path that mounts a stream clears the latch first — Play, Restart, and a source switch, which puts a DIFFERENT stream into the same host and so cannot inherit the old one's evidence.

Two things read it, and they must agree: the "Playing from" caption, and the source row's badge — which reads Current when a source is merely selected and Playing once one really is.

Where the route's code lives

VodDetailsRouteComponent is a thin host. The multi-source concerns it grew live in VodDetailsMultiSourceUiService (component-provided): the playbackLive evidence, the caption, the primary button's position, the source actions, and the failover toast. The "Similar" rail and offline downloads sit in their own component-provided services beside it.

Backup

playPinnedSource reports played / superseded / unavailable, and only unavailable may fall through to the route source. Collapsing the first two meant a double-click on Play — where the second attempt supersedes the first — had the losing attempt conclude "no usable pin" and start the route stream over the playback the winning one had just begun. Same distinction as runFailover's, for the same reason.

A pin is written and its old aliases retired in ONE transaction (setVodSourcePin(db, pin, retireKeys)). Split in two there is no honest outcome for a half-failure: a surviving alias is read before the canonical key on the next open, so reporting success starts the source the user just replaced — while reporting failure leaves the canonical row durable and the UI showing a pin that is no longer the stored one.

Pins ride along with playlist backup, under the playlist they point at, as the optional sourcePins collection. See docs/architecture/playlist-backup-restore.md for the remapping and sanitizing rules — the short version is that matchKey names the film and survives as-is, while the playlist id becomes the imported copy's.

Which engines can fail over

Only the built-in web players (HTML5, Video.js, ArtPlayer) raise the playback diagnostic that reaches onPlaybackFailed(). WebPlayerViewComponent suppresses it for Embedded MPV, and external MPV/VLC never mount that component at all — a stream that dies there is invisible to the app.

So the toggle is hidden, not merely inert, on those engines: in Settings > Playback (reportsPlaybackFailures() gating the row) and in the sources menu (autoFailoverSupported). Leaving it visible would let a user switch on a feature that can never fire. The stored preference is untouched by the change — switching back to a web player restores whatever was set.