FreetvarrLive TV in your browser.Recordings in your library, ad free.*

Self-hosted TV for any TVHeadend-compatible tuner. Watch live, browse the TV guide, and record straight into your media library.
*optional via comskip

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What it is

Technical deep dive

Big Buck Bunny © Blender Foundation (CC BY 3.0)

Live TV

Watch any channel in the browser, on a phone or a desktop, and pause or rewind up to 30 minutes. See what's on now and next across every channel.

Watch live

Free to run

A tuner you own and a free XMLTV guide. No subscription, no levy, no vendor who can retire your recorder.

What to buy

TV Guide

A 7-day programme guide in the browser: schedule, cancel, and series-record in TVHeadend, with favourite channels.

Browse and record

Series folders

Record a series from the TV Guide, match it to a folder under your media root, set a season template, and Freetvarr imports new episodes on your schedule.

Set it up

Hardlink imports

Recordings are already on disk, so the import is a hardlink, not a download: instant, and no second copy of a 3GB transport stream.

The state machine

Plex integration

Refreshes your Plex library after each sync that imports something, or whenever you ask.

Set up Plex

Optional ad removal

comskip commercial detection with a detect-only audit mode and keyframe stream-copy cutting (no transcode), keeping an .orig backup of every cut.

How it works

Removes that work

TVHeadend's DVR API deletes the file once Plex has confirmed its copy, and keeps the entry so TVHeadend's duplicate check still sees the episode.

The rules

Authless LAN service

SQLite-backed, single Docker container, no external runtime dependencies. CSRF, rate limiting, and a strict CSP, built for a trusted home network.

The security model

Plex DVR

If you have a Plex Pass, Plex's own Live TV & DVR may be all you need. With a network tuner, it records free-to-air TV straight into your Plex library and plays live TV in every Plex app. The author built Freetvarr before noticing that a Plex Pass already covered it.

Plex DVR suits you if Plex Media Server already runs on an always-on computer and you watch in Plex apps. Freetvarr suits you if you have no Plex Pass, or you want live TV in any browser, a recorder that a Plex update cannot stop, an ad cut you can undo, and the broadcast captions kept in each recording. Plex DVR instead compares the two and shows the Plex setup.