Stalker Portal — also called "MAC portal" because each subscriber is identified by a MAC address — was designed for Infomir's MAG set-top boxes (MAG250, MAG322, MAG420). It's one of the most common IPTV protocols in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Until recently, running a Stalker portal on Apple TV meant either jailbreaking, spoofing user agents in VLC, or accepting a broken EPG. OneTV Connect implements the full Stalker protocol natively. Here's how to use it.
What is a Stalker portal?
A Stalker portal exposes a JSON API at /portal.php (or /server/load.php on newer versions). It uses MAC-address authentication, a server-side session token, and serves live channels, VOD, series, EPG and category trees through the same endpoint. Compared to Xtream Codes, it's older and more rigid — but many premium providers (especially in Russia, Turkey, Greece, Albania, Iran) only offer Stalker.
Configure your portal in OneTV Connect
Go to Settings → Playlists → Add a playlist → MAC / Stalker portal. You'll need three things from your provider:
- The portal URL (just the host, e.g.
http://portal.example.com:8080). - Your MAC address in
XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XXformat (12 hex chars). Most providers will email you a "00:1A:79:XX:XX:XX" — that's an Infomir prefix, perfectly normal. - The portal language (defaults to
en; some Russian portals requirerufor the right channel order).
The wizard does the handshake (handshake + get_profile), pulls down the channel list, and starts a watchdog that re-authenticates the session every ~5 minutes. The whole flow takes 5–10 seconds for a 1,000-channel portal.
MAC address spoofing — done right
The MAC is your identifier — it must be unique per subscriber. Some providers let you change it from a customer dashboard; others lock it after the first connection. If you've already activated the MAC on a real MAG box, OneTV Connect can take over only if you stop using the box first — most portals enforce one active session per MAC. The app sends the exact same User-Agent string as a MAG250 (Mozilla/5.0 (QtEmbedded; …) MAG200 stbapp ver: 2 rev: 250 Safari/533.3) so the portal can't tell the difference.
CDN routing and play_token TTL
This is where most generic IPTV apps fail with Stalker. The portal returns a stream URL that points to a CDN load balancer, with a one-shot play_token that expires in ~5 seconds. The DNS for that CDN host is often stale — meaning the resolved IP no longer responds. OneTV Connect's solution: always rewrite the stream URL through the portal hostname, then let the portal 302-redirect to the live CDN. Three hops (portal → load balancer → final CDN), all native HTTP redirects, no extra config from you.
Troubleshooting the most common errors
- "Authorization failed" on first connect. Wrong MAC format, or the MAC isn't whitelisted by your provider. Re-check casing — most portals are case-sensitive. Send the MAC to your provider exactly as it appears in your settings.
- Channels load but playback returns HTTP 401. The portal session expired — OneTV Connect should auto-refresh, but if the portal has aggressive session locking, force a reconnect from Settings → Playlist → Reconnect.
- "play_token expired" loops. The portal regenerates the token every play. The app handles this automatically by re-resolving the URL on every channel change. If you see this in logs, you might have an old cached resolved URL — long-press the channel and pick "Reset cached URL".
- VOD launches but stops at 5 seconds. Stalker VOD endpoints don't support range requests. OneTV Connect detects this and disables seeking. If you absolutely need seeking on Stalker VOD, switch the player to MPV with
seekable=0— covered automatically in the app. - EPG is empty. Stalker EPG (
get_short_epg) is fetched on demand, channel by channel — it doesn't pre-fill the entire 7-day grid. Open a channel and the EPG appears within a second.
Stalker is fragile by design — it was built for $40 set-top boxes, not modern apps. OneTV Connect's approach is to behave exactly like an iSTB (the official Infomir client) at the protocol level, which avoids 90 % of the edge cases other apps trip on. If your provider supports Stalker, you can stop hunting for "MAG emulator" apps; this works on day one.