What twiga can’t do

What twiga can’t do

It can’t hand you channels. twiga is relay software you point at a subscription you already pay for — the wire, not the content. You bring your own M3U or Xtream source; twiga plays it. It isn’t a content provider, and there is no catalogue to buy from us.

Play your movies or series. twiga is a live-TV player — it shows the live channels on your line, nothing else. If your provider bundles films or box-sets, they stay in your provider’s app.

It can’t play more than one stream at once. One playback per account, by design — open a second and the first stops. That’s the single-stream architecture, not a limit we’ll quietly lift; it’s the shape of the product.

It can’t get you back in if you lose both your key and your recovery code. Lose one — your key — and you’re fine: with the recovery code you saved at set-up you restore your vault yourself onto a fresh key, no email to us. Lose both and there’s no reset email and no back door, because a door for you is a door for whoever shows up dressed as you. There’s no way back in — you start over with a new invite, and the copies of your provider login and stream URLs in our database are still ciphertext. Keep the code somewhere your key isn’t.

It can’t play a format nothing on your device can decode. The server is a blind relay — no server-side transcode, no catch-up, no recording — so all decoding happens on your device. H.264 plays everywhere; HEVC plays natively where your browser supports it, and where it doesn’t we software-decode HEVC and MPEG-2 in the tab ourselves, as far as your device can keep up; where nothing can — AV1, or HEVC too heavy for a weak device — it hits an honest terminal failure rather than a faked picture. We’d rather say so than show you a black screen pretending to load.

It can’t hide from your provider that its own credentials are in use. Your provider stops seeing your home IP — it sees one of twiga’s exits instead — but it still sees its account active and every request that account makes. twiga moves who sees your IP, not who owns the account.

And it can’t fetch your channel list from twiga’s exits without your provider login passing through our server. An M3U link usually carries your login, and an Xtream login is one, so the fetch sends it through the server, in memory, on its way to your provider. Your provider login is sealed in your browser with your key. The server stores ciphertext and opens it in memory while you’re signed in, then wipes it 30 minutes after your session goes quiet. The whole path is spelled out on is it safe to give us your credentials?

What it doesn’t have

No iPhone or Mac app: iOS and macOS apps are not planned. The player runs in your browser — that’s the only way in during the beta. The Android TV / Google TV app is in testing, not part of this beta.

There’s no playlist URL to paste into an external player, and twiga has no casting or AirPlay — you watch in the browser tab.

And twiga is in beta. During the beta everything is free — nothing is charged and there’s no checkout. €4 a month and €33 a year are the planned post-beta prices, in Monero — no card, no ID, and nothing on file linking the payment to your account. The full walk-through is on how do I pay?

What’s verifiably true — and how to check us

The limits above are the cost of a design that’s built to be checked, not taken on faith. Each claim below comes with the step an outsider can run to confirm it.

Every codec is decoded in your browser; the server relays opaque bytes. Open your browser’s DevTools while a channel plays: the server’s stream responses are raw MPEG-TS, and the WebAssembly decoders load and run in the page. Nothing on the relay reads what you watch, because there’s no decoder on it to read with.

Your provider sees one of twiga’s exits, never your home IP. The player shows the exit your streams leave from; check it against what your provider-side panel reports as the connecting address — they match the exit, not you.

In the DevTools network tab, watch a source get added. The catalogue calls carry your provider login to our relay (it has to reach your provider from one of twiga’s exits, not your home IP), and the seal payload that uploads afterwards is ciphertext. Signing in to twiga sends no password at all: it’s challenge–response, a signature, not a secret.

The guide is fetched over Tor; streams and playlist refreshes leave via twiga’s exits. Any one of these you could find on its own. What twiga does is hold all four at once — in-browser decode, a blind relay, a login and stream URLs sealed with your key, and twiga’s exits on the provider side — in a browser tab. Each piece is checkable on its own; the point is that they hold at the same time.

Quick answers

Does twiga give me channels or a subscription?

No. twiga is relay software, not a content provider — it’s the wire, not the subscription. You bring your own M3U or Xtream source from a provider you already pay for, and twiga plays it. It sells no channels and hands out no logins.

Can I watch two channels at once on twiga?

No. twiga plays one stream at a time per account — one playback, by design. Open a second and the first stops. It’s a deliberate limit of the single-stream architecture, not a bug you can work around.

I lost my key — can I still get in?

Yes, if you saved your recovery code. Restore is self-serve: you send a verifier made from the code, we hand back a second, code-wrapped copy of your vault key, your device unwraps it and rotates you onto a brand-new key and a fresh recovery code. No reset email and no support ticket — and no way for a stolen database to do the same, because the rotation is authorized by a signature only your recovery code can make. Only losing both your key and your recovery code is unrecoverable.

What happens if I lose my key and my recovery code?

You can’t sign in or restore: there is no reset email and no back door, so there’s no way back in. You start over with a new invite. The copies of your provider login and stream URLs in our database are still ciphertext.

Does twiga hide from my provider that I’m using its subscription?

No. Your provider stops seeing your home IP — it sees one of twiga’s exits instead — but it still sees its own account active and every request that account makes. twiga moves who sees your IP, not who owns the account.