antix TV – how does it work?

To watch BBC you need to be in the UK (or use a vpn and set it to UK).

To answer your question, no I don’t use this program.

I have been using aCSTV a lot for quite some time. It did not cross my mind to watch any UK channels but I have been watching programming from some other countries in Europe with no problem.

antiX ugpraded to Trixie, installation worked, I guess.
I clicked to update the list of stations during the install, there seemed to be too many playlist m3u files saved to ‘/dev/shm/’ from various GitHubs.
Calling the corresponding script, I get the following output in Flubxox:

1) There is an extra temporary pop-up with warning “Excessive channel list (594 Eintrage)” (translation is mixed up: English + German) with additional information.
2) Terminal output:

nice: cannot set niceness: Permission denied
Connection to 8.8.8.8 443 port [tcp/https] succeeded!

(gtkdialog:9150): Gdk-WARNING **: 16:17:24.888: gdk_window_set_icon_list: icons too large

Regarding the niceness permission issue – is there any group the user should be added to?

3) The pop-up window with station selection is located at the right bottom corner and overlapping outside of the (monitor) field-of-view.
I see no way to grab it and move it.

After this test, I’ve purged ‘acstv’ and autoremoved its dependencies.

Some answers.

In case of issues, please make sure you’ve read and understood the user manual found when clicking in the button field on the “Settings” button, there click “Help”, which already answers many questions raised here.

m4r35n357 wrote:

and after spending a little time looking for it

Isn’t antiX TV literally present in the antiX Main Menu, section Programs → Multimedia for you? It should be there, at least for me it is.
But you’ve guessed correctly, the script aCSTV.sh is the core part of it.

m4r35n357 wrote:

Tried updating channel lists:

The update run captured in your codepaste works precisely as intended. You’ve successfully fetched the stations listing for the country from iptv.org at gitlab:

m4r35n357 wrote:

2026-05-07 14:57:48 (24.8 MB/s) – ‘/dev/shm/aCSTV-2045416.tmp’ saved [20898/20898]

From your output, I take you have ticked the checkbox “check stations” (or similar reading in English language). This means, after updating this listing, the script tries to connect each station and check whether it can be accessed from your country or not. As the integrated help manual already explains, this can take a really long time. Each station not responding from your place is removed from the listing during this process, so you end up with a clean listing of working stations.

All the lines starting with
Error: ...
are nothing but the response of stations not available for whatever reason from your place, and thus absolutely expected and correct output. Just wait for the process to complete. It will not be repeated when starting antiX TV next time unless you update the stations list. Alternatively you can untick the checkbox, but then you’ll get many buttons which don’t work, and you’ll have to remove them manually later in the settings.

m4r35n357 wrote:

<CTRL-C>
Exiting… (Quit)

Obviously you have lost patience and killed the process by entering Ctrl-C on console. Thus the script exits, and since this is done in an unclean state of amidst of processing, it throws some ugly errors before finally quitting (all of which are expected, since they are nothing but several attempts to shut down internal processes in an ordered way, which you have killed already prematurely by your Ctrl-C, so they complain. Nothing to worry about.)

m4r35n357 wrote:

the “nice” error

This is merely the attempt of the script to priorise the video rendering above its own logic processing and other tasks running on the system, so you get stutter free playback even when system is at its limits already, but the restrictions on current systems render this useless, since only root can now nice even user processes. It doesn’t hurt, the video rendering by MPV will simply not be niced as originally intended, but on the other hand this is only actually needed for very slow hardware, way slower than what even a single core 32 bit CPU antiX still fully supports can deliver, or if you outpower your system parallel with other programs. So just ignore that message, it is of no relevance and doesn’t mean anything here. But in case you have issues with stuttering video and you suspect the culprit are concurrent processes, you can try nicing the respective mpv process manually e.g. by using the nice command sudoed from console or by using sudo htop while playback is running.

sybok wrote:

is there any group the user should be added to?

No, there isn’t. As explained, just ignore that meaningless message.

sybok wrote:

The pop-up window with station selection is located at the right bottom corner and overlapping outside of the (monitor) field-of-view.
I see no way to grab it and move it.

Do you have an unusual screen size/resolution? The calculation should work for most common default settings.
So please let me know your system details. In particular what screen size and resolution you run on, and additionally the output of:

$ wmctrl -d | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f-4 | grep -F "*" | cut -d" " -f4 | cut -dx -f1
$ wmctrl -d | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f-4 | grep -F "*" | cut -d" " -f4 | cut -dx -f2

(from which the script calculates the proper window position)

sybok wrote:

(gtkdialog:9150): Gdk-WARNING **: 16:17:24.888: gdk_window_set_icon_list: icons too large

And did you install an incompatible icon- or desktop theme possibly? What themes are you running? The above issue with the buttons not reachable for you might be connected to oversized icons very well.

sybok wrote:

There is an extra temporary pop-up with warning “Excessive channel list (594 Eintrage)”

Well, 594 entries is actually a lot already, but as you said yourself, this message is temporary merely. For users with such excessive stations lists the control window is cut automatically at startup into as much individual pages as needed, through which you can scroll then with additional arrow buttons showing up in this case at the top of the button field. So this message is merely informational, making the user aware of the fact that it most likely would be a good idea to slim down your listing to the number of stations you actually plan to attend (No idea who has time to watch that ridiculously many stations…) The script considers around 50 to 100 stations as a max. reasonable size. As said, it can and does handle more if you really want and need it that way.

olsztyn wrote:

Out of curiosity let me set my channels to the UK and try BBC…
To confirm, from TV channels in the UK, just as OP, I was not able to successfully start BBC English language TV but I there was no problem to start BBC News Pashtun language, as well as Afghaninstan TV channel, which sounds either Urdu or Pashtun.
Perhaps English language is not allowed in the UK?

Seems there is a specific problem with UK stations. Most likely they have blocked and dongled the access for native applications like MPV completely meanwhile in their country, and only accept access via their own “apps” and from OS they can fully scan in the background for user tracking via active scripting. Shame on them.

Finally there is one crucial point when using antiX TV. It is merely a script, steering already existing applications, in particular MPV, and not executing anything on it’s own. Which means in turn, that you can do everything it does as well manually on console. Secondly, it relies heavily on the presence and up-to-date status of the programmes and helper-tools it controls. As mentioned, it uses MPV as backend. And MPV again needs for proper stream access the most recent version of yt-dlp. Check with

$ yt-dlp -U
Latest version: stable@2026.03.17 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp
yt-dlp is up to date (stable@2026.03.17 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp)

which currently is the latest version available.

If you are still running the deprecated “youtube-dl” instead of “yt-dlp”, or an outdated yt-dlp version, there is a very high chance that you will receive a bunch of crude error messages instead of the expected output. Same goes for missing helpers on which yt-dlp in turn relies, such as ffmpeg and so on; even the python version counts:

»yt-dlp supports only Python 3.9+, and will remove support for more versions as they become EOL«

(quoted from their manpage) So also check your python- and ffmpeg versions.

Please always check on an virgin antiX full Live system whether antiX TV works out of the box for you first when it fails on your installed antiX. If so, there is a high chance that you have removed some implicit helper tool in the chain unnoticed from your install, or have installed an incompatible version of something. If so, please let me know what you found not present, then it can be added to the package as dependency.

If antiX TV fails to come up, try removing its “aCSTV” config folder in ~/.config completely (keep a backup copy elsewhere, so you can restore the files later one by one to isolate the culprit). It will be rebuilt at next startup automatically then, using built-in defaults known to work.

I have checked right now, here antiX TV works perfectly fine out of the box on antiX 23 and antiX 26, at single-core 32 bit and multi-core 64 bit hardware both (see screenshot). Running antiX live from USB, fully apt-upgraded. Desktop: zzz-IceWM. Init: runit mode, but that shouldn’t count.

I don’t really use antiXTV, so take it with a grain of salt, but when I have tested it I really really really didn’t like that all the windows were by default undecorated, no borders or titlebars. And there’s not even a setting to turn them on? Is there some practical reason for that, or it’s just a preference?