Keel is a desktop player for people's own IPTV subscriptions. It was built around one stubborn problem: many IPTV servers drop connections constantly, and most players simply give up. Keel retries, reconnects and keeps playing, and wraps that in a living-room interface for live TV, films and series, with recording, downloads and one shared playlist list across all of your devices.
Testing against a real subscription showed that around half of all new connections to the server were reset before any video arrived, while connections that were kept open worked every time. Ordinary players open a fresh connection for every stream, seek and segment, so they fail at random and blame the channel. Keel puts a small relay inside the app. The video engine only ever talks to the relay, and the relay reuses open connections, retries resets, reconnects live channels when they drop and never opens a second stream on accounts that allow one connection at a time.
The same relay makes other features cheap. Recording a channel is just a second copy of bytes that are already arriving, so it needs no extra connection, and per-channel headers from M3U playlists are sent exactly where they belong.
ConnectAdd an Xtream Codes login or M3U playlist, in the app or from a phone by QR code.
BrowseLive channels with a programme guide, poster grids for films and series, search and favourites.
WatchA full-window player with on-video controls, resume points and next-episode autoplay.
Keep goingDropped streams reconnect by themselves instead of ending on an error.
Inside the app
A living-room interface on the desktop
Live TV with categories, channel numbers, a live preview and now and next.Films and series as poster grids, sorted by newest, rating or name.The player: controls over the picture that fade away while you watch.A TV guide across channels, with catch-up where the provider offers it.
Categories with counts in the provider's own order, channel numbers and logos, now and next on every channel, a full programme grid and catch-up on channels that support it.
Films and series
Poster grids with cover art and ratings, details pages with plot, cast and running time, and seasons that show your progress through every episode.
Picks up where you left off
Resume points save as you watch, Continue Watching collects unfinished titles, and anything into the credits counts as watched automatically.
Next-episode autoplay
An up-next countdown, a global threshold and a per-series "credits start here" point for shows with long end credits.
Record and download
Record the live channel you are watching with one press, and download films, episodes or whole seasons to watch offline, with pause and resume.
Multi-view
Watch two or four channels side by side and move the sound between them with a click, within the provider's connection limit.
One playlist list, every device
Link devices with a short code. They share a single playlist list, so changing it once updates them all, while each device keeps its own licence.
Family friendly
PIN-locked categories that stay hidden from search, plus hidden categories for the countries and genres you never watch.
A proper player
Seeking, audio and subtitle tracks, keyboard shortcuts, channel zapping by number, a sleep timer and a 12 or 24-hour clock.
The build
A desktop app with its own licensing service
Keel is written in Python with Qt. Video runs through Qt Multimedia's bundled FFmpeg engine and is drawn through QML, so the controls sit over the picture at roughly the same CPU cost as a plain native video window, measured at 16% of one core against 12% for 1080p, compared with 66% for the usual overlay approach. Licensing runs on a small PHP and MariaDB service on this server: each install registers a device ID on first launch, which starts a seven-day trial, and every licence answer is signed so the app can verify it offline.
Device-bound licencesA stable MAC-style ID per device, derived from the machine rather than a network card that changes with VPNs and USB adapters, paired with a private install secret.
Signed everythingEd25519 signatures on every licence response and every update manifest, checked against a key built into the app, so neither can be faked.
Payments that license automaticallyThe app's Buy button opens checkout for that device. A payment webhook applies a one-year or lifetime plan with no keys to copy.
Shared playlistsDevices linked by a code form a group with one encrypted playlist list, managed from any of the devices or from the web portal.
Safe self-updatesNew versions are downloaded, checked against a signed SHA-256 fingerprint and installed while the app restarts.
Lean release buildsTrimming unused Qt modules took the download from 190 MB to under 60 MB without losing a feature.
Try Keel free for seven days
Download Keel for Windows, add your playlist and watch. After the trial it costs £1 a year or £5 for life, per device, paid from inside the app.
Keel is a media player only. It does not sell, include or provide any channels, subscriptions or playlists.
