Getting Tvheadend Picons to Work in Plex

Picons are handy if you are using the Plex Tvheadend channel and you want the TV station icons to show up.

I was able to pull down all the Australian TV icons online from Beyonwiz (this is for my Ubuntu Linux Tvheadend server):

apt-get install git
cd /usr/src
git clone https://bitbucket.org/beyonwiz/picons-australia.git

Then you can set the Tvheadend (TVH) server “Configuration -> General” tab to prefer picons over channel name, and set the path to file:///usr/src/picons-australia/picon

The other thing you need to do is under “Configuration -> Access Entries”, add a new entry with the following:

Enabled: tick
Username: *
Password: *
Network prefix:  The IP address of your Plex server or Kodi player, or even local subnet if you want. e.g. "10.1.0.45/32" or "10.1.0.0/24" (or "127.0.0.1/32" if Plex and TVH are on the same box).
Streaming: tick

That should be enough access to get the icons working.

When I get time I’ll see if I can feed Kodi the picons in a similar way, as I prefer this server-side method of delivering TV channel icons, rather than client-side. For now I just point Kodi to a local directory with PNG images named the same as the channel names, which seems to work fine.

The only issue with my current picon set-up for the Plex Tvheadend Channel, and it is a minor one, is that the picons get truncated on my iPhone as they aren’t square format. They do look look fine on the PC though. I’m tossing up whether it’s worth my time to create square icons for the 22 stations I make use of in Melbourne Australia.

Other than that, I’m pretty stoked with being able to get the icons/picons to display!