Playlists rot. Providers move servers, links expire, and a file that worked last month is half dead today. The cleaner tests every channel in turn and rebuilds the playlist from the ones still standing.
Testing happens in your browser, five channels at a time. Nothing about your playlist is uploaded anywhere.
How a channel is judged
- Working — the host answered and the browser could read the response
- Server reachable — the host answered but blocks browser reads; the stream is alive, so it is kept
- Down — an error came back, or the host could not be reached
- Timeout — nothing came back within ten seconds
What ends up in the cleaned file
- Every channel that answered, whether or not the browser could read it
- Nothing that was down or timed out
- Malformed #EXTINF lines are dropped while parsing and counted separately
- Your original file is never modified — the cleaned playlist is a new download