Interdimensional Cable

How it works

Cable opens on a random channel. space, the right arrow, or a swipe to the left moves to another; the left arrow, or a swipe to the right, goes back. The menu at the bottom picks a topic or a country, and auto-surf changes the channel on a timer.

Every channel has a number, shown in the corner when you tune in, and it stays that channel's number. Type one to go straight there; the up and down arrows go to the next number and the one before, and l flips between the last two channels. Numbers run by subject and then by country, so the channels near one are usually like it.

The guide (g, or a swipe down) is a grid of the next six hours, channel by channel, with a picture of the programme in focus where the listings have one; it also lists what is on now and next and what starts in the next hour, and lets you search by the name of a show. From a programme that hasn't started, switch at changes channel for you when it does, if cable is still open. q shows four channels at once, muted but for the one you choose; pick one to watch it.

While you are changing channels, cable tunes in the one you are likely to go to next — the next random pick, or the next number up or down — out of sight, so the change is immediate. It lets that go after a minute without a change, and doesn't do it at all on a connection that asks to save data. In Chrome and Edge it also evens out the volume: a loud channel is turned down to the level broadcasters aim for, and nothing is turned up past your own volume. A phone's lock screen and a headset's buttons show what's on, and skip forward or back to change channel.

Once a visit, cable opens with AinaDara's ident, a few seconds long, and goes in through the screen of an old set onto the first channel. Any key or tap goes straight to the channel, and it can be turned off in settings. It opens onto a random channel, or the one settings say to start on: the last you watched, today's pick or a favorite; type a channel's number while it plays and it opens there. Browsers only let a page make sound after you have pressed something, so the first time it may wait a moment for a key or a tap.

There is no account and nothing to sign in to. Favorites, what you have watched, and your settings stay in this browser.

Keys

Captions

Press c, or the CC button, to turn captions on. Where a channel broadcasts its own, cable shows those. Where it has none, cable can generate them: a small speech-recognition model on our own server listens to the channel and sends the words back. On most channels each word is shown as the picture reaches it; where cable can't line them up (Safari, and the Pluto TV channels), they arrive a second or two behind. It can translate them into English as it goes, which helps most on the channels from abroad. Size, background and the choice to translate are in settings.

Generated captions are made live and kept nowhere: neither the audio nor the text is stored. The server can caption a few channels at a time; when it is busy, cable says so.

Where the channels come from

Every channel is a stream its broadcaster publishes openly. Most are listed by iptv-org, a community index of free-to-air and free ad-supported channels. The old commercials and the public-domain films come from the Internet Archive.

The live cameras — the Earth from the space station, Kīlauea and Etna, a waterhole in the Namib, Shibuya Crossing, freight trains in Virginia, the jellies at the Monterey Bay Aquarium — are YouTube streams their owners run around the clock. They play in YouTube's privacy-enhanced player, credited to whoever runs them.

AinaDara Classics is our own channel: public-domain films with period ads and cartoons between them, programmed on a home server. It appears only while that server is on.

AinaDara Reels and AinaDara Cartoons are ours too, and always on: public-domain films from the Internet Archive, played to a timetable. Reels has cartoons in the morning, industrial and classroom films by day, silent comedy (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd) in the evening, and the strangest of the educational films after midnight; Cartoons runs the cartoons all day. The times are your own, and everyone in your time zone sees the same film at the same moment, so a film already under way is joined part-way through, as on television.

The schedules in the guide come from the free services' own listings, as published by i.mjh.nz, and are fetched by our server every few hours, not by your browser. A channel is given a schedule only where it can be matched to its listing with certainty, so some have none.

Cable doesn't host, record or re-encode anything. Your browser plays each stream directly from its source, which sees the request the way any website would.

How the channels are checked

Once a week every stream is fetched again. A channel that fails twice in a row is marked, and the checked filter skips it. Most channels that stop answering have moved, so a failing channel is looked up in iptv-org's index under the same name, and if it is listed at a new address that works, it moves there and keeps its number. One that is still failing four weeks later is removed. Streams served over plain http are left out entirely: a browser on an https page refuses to play them.

The check runs from one place. Some channels only play in their home country and others come and go during the day, so expect the occasional dark channel. Cable moves on by itself after a few seconds.

Last check:

Report a channel

If a channel shouldn't be here — it's broken, mislabelled, or it's yours and you'd like it removed — write to hello@ainadara.com with its name. The share link (the globe, then Share link) identifies it exactly. Removal requests are handled first.