What is XUI.live
XUI.live is a self-hosted IPTV control panel built for operators who run streaming as a business. Content, subscribers, delivery servers and the numbers behind all three live in one place, on hardware you own, with no third party between you and your audience.
One XUI.live licence unlocks the complete panel. No tiers, no per-stream fees, no features held back for a higher plan.
Everything your operation needs
Content
Live channels, movies, series, radio and 24/7 channels you assemble yourself, all managed from the same catalogue. Import an entire library from an M3U, a folder or another Xtream-compatible panel, and XUI.live matches it against TMDB automatically — posters, plots, cast, genres, runtime and trailers arrive with it.
Point a watch folder at your storage and new files become published content on their own: matched, categorised, encoded where needed, subtitles extracted, quality upgraded when a better copy lands. EPG is imported on a schedule and mapped per channel, with a browsable guide inside the panel.
TV archive and timeshift let a subscriber rewind a live channel or catch something that aired hours ago, and any part of that archive can be clipped into permanent VOD in two clicks.
Subscribers
Every subscription is an account with its own expiry, connection limit and channel access — delivered as a playlist line, a MAG set-top box or an Enigma2 receiver, whichever your customer owns. Bouquets and packages let you sell a shape of access rather than a list of channels, and trials convert browsers into buyers without manual work.
Lock an account to specific IPs, user agents, a country or an ISP. Push an on-screen message straight to a MAG device. Every connection is logged, geolocated and attributable.
Resellers
Give resellers their own panel, their own credit balance and precisely the permissions you choose — then let them build sub-resellers underneath, within limits you set. Credit movements, line creation and every administrative action are recorded against the account that performed them.
Delivery
Four output formats from a single source — HLS, low-latency HLS, MPEG-TS and RTMP — so set-top boxes, smart TVs, phones and desktop players are all served without a separate packager or a second product to license.
When one server stops being enough, you add load balancers and proxies from inside the panel. Installation, licensing and monitoring all happen there; the new node carries traffic minutes after you enter its IP address.
Control
Every server reports connections, users, CPU, memory, disk, load and throughput to a live dashboard, with subscribers plotted on a map as they connect. Blocking works at the level attacks actually arrive on: IP, subnet, ISP, ASN and user agent. Two-factor authentication protects panel accounts, scheduled backups run to S3 or SFTP, and alerts reach you by Telegram, webhook or in the panel itself.
Integration
Three documented APIs — administration, reseller, and a public Xtream-compatible endpoint that the existing ecosystem of player apps and billing systems already speaks. Anything the panel does, your own tooling can do too.
115 admin screens. 66 database tables. 14 interface languages.
Built on a current stack
XUI.live ships its own runtime. Everything below is bundled, pinned to a version we test, and isolated
from whatever the host operating system happens to carry — an apt upgrade cannot move it
underneath you.
| Component | Version | Role |
|---|---|---|
| PHP | 8.3.14 | The panel and the streaming edge, on a current engine rather than the PHP 7.x era most legacy IPTV panels never left |
| nginx | 1.30.2 | HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 delivery, TLS termination, rate limiting and response buffering |
| nginx-rtmp | 1.30.2 + flv module 1.2.13 | A second, dedicated instance for RTMP ingest and HTTP-FLV, authorised against the panel on every publish and play |
| FFmpeg | 8.0 and 7.1 | Transcoding, recording, archive and timeshift — both builds ship, switchable per installation |
| MariaDB | 10.11 / 11.4 | Catalogue, subscribers and history |
| Redis | live state | Connection tracking, kept off the database entirely |
| OpenSSL | 3.5.7 | Transport security for the panel and for delivery |
FFmpeg, on your terms
Two FFmpeg builds ship with every installation and you choose which one runs. 8.0 is the default — the 2025 release, with the newest codec work and encoder optimisations. 7.1 stays available as a proven 2024 static build for anyone who prefers a known quantity, and switching between them is a single setting.
Both are compiled in house rather than pulled from a distribution repository, and both carry hardware acceleration: CUDA, VAAPI and DRM, with ten hardware encoders across NVIDIA, Intel Quick Sync and AMD. A transcode that would saturate a CPU can be handed to a GPU instead.
Supported on Ubuntu 24.04, 24.10, 25.04 and 25.10. The installer verifies the release before it touches anything.
Engineered for scale
Streaming punishes architecture, and it is where most IPTV panel software quietly gives up. XUI.live is built so the components that get hit hardest do the least work.
Encoding cost is per channel, not per viewer. A single ffmpeg process serves a channel on a server no matter how many people are watching it. Growing an audience costs bandwidth and memory, never CPU — which is why a busy XUI.live panel tracks channel count rather than subscriber count on its CPU graph.
Segments are served from RAM. The segment ramdisk is sized at 90% of available memory and re-mounts itself if it ever disappears. Delivery is bounded by memory and network rather than disk seek times.
The delivery path never touches the database. Serving a segment reads pre-serialised cache files and answers. On a load balancer that counts twice: an edge server never reaches back across the network to the main database to hand over a video segment.
The kernel is tuned for this workload. The installer applies BBR congestion control with fair queueing, socket buffers sized for tens of thousands of concurrent long-lived streams, a widened local port range and file descriptor limits raised past twenty million. Stock Ubuntu is configured for a general-purpose server, and it shows the moment real traffic arrives.
Work that can be avoided is avoided. On-demand channels start when someone asks for them and stop when nobody is watching. Transcoding is opt-in per stream, so a channel you pass through untouched costs nothing to carry.
Scaling out is a supported operation, not a workaround. Add load balancers from the panel and connections distribute across them. The main server keeps the database and the administration; edge servers do one job, without contention.
Getting started
XUI.live installs onto a clean Ubuntu server in about twenty minutes, most of it spent downloading. The installer brings up the whole stack, licensing takes a single code, and the panel is ready for its first channel the same afternoon.