Channel Mapparr

A Dispatcharr plugin that standardizes broadcast (OTA) and premium/cable channel names using network data and curated channel lists. It supports multiple country databases and offers advanced organization features.

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.

Features

Naming

• Broadcast (OTA) station matching for United States local affiliates, by callsign, against a bundled 1,915-station table published by the Federal Communications Commission. 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 12 countries, about 42,900 channels: AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, MX, NL, NO, 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 additionally 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.

Click that heading and the table appears.

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. Every other action works fully offline; 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

1. Log in to Dispatcharr's web UI.
2. Navigate to Plugins.
3. Click Import Plugin and upload the plugin zip file.
4. Enable the plugin after installation.

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

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 in order to match them, and never the streams themselves. The only outbound connection it makes is to GitHub, and only when you run Apply Per-Channel Logos, which fetches a public list of logo filenames. 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.