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Which plugins do I need?

There are six plugins here and they genuinely overlap. Four of them do fuzzy name matching, three can change channel visibility, two assign EPG, two assign logos, and two sort streams by quality. That is confusing, and you almost certainly do not need all six.

This page exists to tell you which ones to install and which to skip.

Start here

flowchart TD
    A{"Do you already have<br/>channels in Dispatcharr?"} -->|"No, just an M3U"| B{"Do you want to mirror a real<br/>provider lineup (Sky, DIRECTV…)?"}
    B -->|Yes| L["<b>Lineuparr</b><br/>creates the whole lineup in one pass"]
    B -->|"No, I'll build it myself"| C["Create channels in Dispatcharr,<br/>then continue below"]
    A -->|Yes| D{"Are the channel<br/>names a mess?"}
    C --> D
    D -->|Yes| E["<b>Channel Mapparr</b><br/>standardize the names"]
    D -->|No| F
    E --> F{"Do channels have the<br/>right streams attached?"}
    F -->|"No / wrong / no backups"| G["<b>Stream-Mapparr</b><br/>attach and rank streams"]
    F -->|Yes| H
    G --> H{"Is the TV guide<br/>blank or wrong?"}
    H -->|Yes| I["<b>EPG-Janitor</b><br/>fix EPG assignments"]
    H -->|No| J
    I --> J{"Do you have PPV or<br/>event channels?"}
    J -->|Yes| K["<b>Event Channel Managarr</b><br/>hide them when nothing is on"]
    J -->|No| Z(["Done"])
    K --> Z
    L --> H

IPTV Checker sits outside this flow. Run it any time you want to know which of your streams are actually dead, ideally before Stream-Mapparr so that stream ranking has fresh data to work with.

Do I need this one?

Plugin Install it if… Skip it if…
IPTV Checker You want dead and low-quality streams identified and tagged. You do not care about pruning dead streams, or your provider is reliable.
Channel Mapparr Your channel names are inconsistent (UK: SKY SPORTS F1 FHD, Sky Sports F1 HD). Your names are already clean, or you built the lineup with Lineuparr, which already named them.
Stream-Mapparr Channels have no streams, the wrong streams, or no failover backups. You used Lineuparr and are happy with its matching. (You can still use Stream-Mapparr afterwards purely to re-rank.)
EPG-Janitor Your guide shows "No Program Information Available". Your EPG is clean, or you have no EPG source at all.
Event Channel Managarr You carry PPV, fight-night, or event channels that sit empty most of the week. You have no event channels. Most people do not need this.
Lineuparr You want a real provider's lineup (numbering, groups, logos, EPG) built for you in one action. You already have a curated lineup you like, or you want fine-grained control at each step.

Where they overlap

This is the part nobody explains. Several plugins do the same job, and running them in the wrong order makes them fight each other.

Job Plugins that do it Which one should you use?
Fuzzy name matching Channel Mapparr, Stream-Mapparr, EPG-Janitor, Lineuparr All four, but they match different things. Channel Mapparr matches your channel to a channel database. Stream-Mapparr matches streams to your channels. EPG-Janitor matches your channels to EPG entries. Lineuparr matches streams to a provider lineup. They are not redundant, they are the same engine pointed at four different problems.
Toggling channel visibility Stream-Mapparr, Event Channel Managarr They will undo each other. Stream-Mapparr's Manage Channel Visibility disables every channel with no streams; Event Channel Managarr hides channels with no current event. If you use both, run Stream-Mapparr first. See Scheduling and run order.
Assigning EPG EPG-Janitor, Lineuparr Lineuparr assigns EPG when it builds the lineup. EPG-Janitor repairs EPG that is missing or broken. Build with Lineuparr, maintain with EPG-Janitor.
Assigning logos Channel Mapparr, Lineuparr Whichever built your channels. Do not run both over the same channels expecting different results.
Sorting streams by quality Stream-Mapparr, Lineuparr Both rank alternates. Stream-Mapparr's is the more capable one (it can rank by measured throughput, not just advertised resolution). If you use Lineuparr, you can still run Stream-Mapparr's Sort Alternate Streams afterwards.
Finding bad streams IPTV Checker Only one, but note what it is: a one-shot audit of every stream in your database. It tells you what was dead at scan time. A scan of several thousand streams can take many hours.

The same knob has different names on different pages

Match Sensitivity means the same thing in all four matchers, even where the labels differ. It is the minimum similarity score a name has to reach: Relaxed = 70, Normal = 80, Strict = 90, Exact = 95. Higher means fewer, safer matches.

(If a page in this guide says "Loose", it is out of date. The setting is called Relaxed.)

They also all share one escape hatch: when a channel simply refuses to match, define a Custom Alias for it. Do not confuse that with Ignore Tags, which strips noise like [FHD] from names before comparing them. That is a different tool for a different problem.

The one thing everybody gets wrong

Every plugin here can change a lot of rows at once, and several of them delete things you might not expect:

  • Stream-Mapparr's Match & Assign replaces a channel's whole stream list: it does not add to it.
  • Lineuparr's Full Sync deletes channels it could not match.
  • EPG-Janitor's Strip Hidden EPG deletes program data, which can blank the guide for other channels sharing that EPG entry.
  • Channel Mapparr's Tag Unknown Channels and logo actions ignore Dry Run Mode and write immediately.

Each is explained on its own page. Take a backup before your first run of anything, use Dry Run where it exists, and read the danger callout at the top of each page. They are there because these specific behaviours have surprised people.