User Guide

Accept the Terms of Use

The first time you open ZapStream, a Terms of Use screen appears before anything else. You must tap Accept to continue — there's no way to skip past it. If you tap Decline instead, you'll see a screen asking you to review the terms again; the app can't be used until you accept.

Choose your content source

Next, the setup wizard asks where your channels and content come from. Pick one:

• M3U playlist — paste the URL of your playlist.
• Xtream Codes — enter your provider's server address, username, and password.

Pick your language

ZapStream is available in 20 languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese. Change it anytime in Settings — it applies immediately, no restart needed.

Add more sources later

You're not limited to one playlist or account. Add as many profiles as you like from Settings → Profiles, each with its own name and a colorful avatar icon so you can tell them apart at a glance. Switch your active profile anytime. Each profile has a Test button that checks your connection step by step (device connectivity, DNS lookup, server reachability, login, and how many simultaneous connections you're using), and Xtream Codes profiles also show your subscription's expiry date.

Three destinations

From Home you can open Live TV, Movies, or Series. Movies and Series only appear for Xtream Codes sources — plain M3U playlists are live channels only.

Keep your channel list current

A Refresh button reloads your live channel list on demand, and an “Updated X ago” label shows how long ago it last refreshed — so you always know whether what you're browsing is current.

Search everything at once

The search icon opens a single search box that looks across Live TV, Movies, and Series at the same time, showing up to 20 matches in each category — plus an “On TV” section that searches the programme guide, so you can find a match or a film by its name rather than by the channel showing it.

Your active profile

Your current profile's avatar appears in the Home header — tap it to jump straight into Settings and switch sources or manage profiles.

Browse by category

A sidebar lists all your channel groups; pick one to filter the list, or choose “All” to clear the filter. Many providers ship hundreds of fragmented categories, so ZapStream folds related ones into collapsible groups by country and language — tap a group to open its sub-categories. If you'd rather see your provider's list exactly as it comes, turn category normalization off in Settings → Display.

Search your channels

The search bar filters channels as you type, searching inside the category you currently have selected. A “Search all Live TV” button appears just under the field if you want to widen it to your whole channel list; that stays on until you pick a different category. A channel also matches when the programme guide says it is showing something your query matches — those rows show the matching programme and its start time in place of the usual now/next, so it is clear why they turned up.

Favorite your channels

Mark a channel as a favorite (hold OK on your remote, or long-press on touch) to add a ⭐ Favorites shortcut pinned to the top of the sidebar, so your most-watched channels are always one tap away. Favorites are kept per source profile, so each provider gets its own.

See what's on

When your source provides program guide (EPG) data, each channel shows what's currently playing and what's coming up next.

Zap between channels while watching

While watching, press Up/Down on your remote to jump to the next or previous channel without leaving the player. On a phone, tablet or iPhone, swipe sideways across the picture instead — right-to-left for the next channel, left-to-right for the previous one.

If a channel won't play

ZapStream automatically retries a few times with a “Reconnecting…” message before giving up and showing a clear error with a Retry button. It also watches for a stream that's silently stuck buffering and retries that too.

Browse the catalog

Movies and Series each show a poster grid with a category sidebar and search, plus a featured spotlight banner that highlights a title as you browse.

Pick up where you left off

A “Continue Watching” row keeps your in-progress movies and episodes at the top of the screen, with a progress bar on each — tap one to resume exactly where you stopped.

Favorite what you care about

The same star-marking used for Live TV works here too, with its own Favorites shortcut in the sidebar.

Episodes and seasons

Opening a series shows its seasons and episodes; when one episode ends, an “Up Next” card counts down and auto-plays the next one — or skip ahead manually anytime. Finished episodes are marked as watched automatically, and the series shows a continuation card pointing at the next one you haven't seen. To undo that, hold OK on an episode (or swipe it on iPhone) to clear both the watched mark and its saved position.

If something won't play

ZapStream retries a couple of times before showing an error. If several titles in a row turn out to be missing, it will offer to refresh your library in case your provider has removed or replaced them.

Seeking and speed

Drag the progress bar to move through a movie or episode — on a TV remote, ◀/▶ move a preview playhead and OK commits the jump, with each press in the same direction eventually stepping further (10s, then 30s, 60s, 180s). A remote's dedicated ◄◄/►► media keys start accelerating rewind/fast-forward at 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, and 32x. Your position is saved automatically as you watch.

Audio and subtitles

Pick a different audio track or subtitle track whenever the stream offers more than one, without interrupting playback. Subtitle size (Small/Medium/Large) and the darkness of the box behind the text are adjustable, so captions stay readable over bright video.

Fix a stretched or letterboxed picture

On phone, tablet and iPhone, an aspect-ratio button in the player cycles Fit → Crop → Stretch, and a press-and-hold opens a labelled picker. Crop is the one that rescues channels arriving with black bars burnt into the frame. Your choice sticks across channels and restarts. TV doesn't need this — a 16:9 screen already matches 16:9 content.

Keep watching while you do something else

On phone, tablet and iPhone, leaving the app while a player is open shrinks the video into a floating Picture-in-Picture window, or you can tap the PiP button in the player chrome. (Not available on TV, or for iPhone series episodes.)

Search within a screen

Every list — Live TV, Movies, Series — has its own search bar that filters that catalog as you type. It searches inside the category you have selected, with a one-press “Search all” button under the field to widen it to the whole section. That widened scope resets as soon as you pick a different category.

Search everything from Home

The search icon on Home opens a global search covering all three at once, ignoring your selected categories, with results grouped into labeled sections (capped at 20 each, with a note if there are more).

Find which channel a programme is on

Global search also looks inside the programme guide. An “On TV” section at the top lists matching programmes rather than channels — each row gives the title, when it starts (“Now”, “in 25 min”, “Tomorrow 14:00”), and how many channels carry it. Tap a row to expand it into that channel list, then tap a channel to start watching. Quality and backup versions of the same channel are folded into a single entry, and programmes that have already finished are left out. It covers only the channels your provider supplies guide data for, so it adds to the channel-name search rather than replacing it.

Favorite straight from search results

Star a result directly from the search screen — no need to go find it in its own list first.

Profiles

Add, edit, or remove your M3U and Xtream Codes sources, choose an avatar for each, and check the connection with the Test button. Xtream Codes profiles also show your subscription's expiry date here.

Language

Switch between 20 languages at any time; the change applies instantly.

Filtering Categories

Choose which categories to load for Live TV, Movies, and Series independently. If your provider has a huge catalog, pre-selecting only the categories you actually watch makes everything load noticeably faster. Leave nothing selected to load everything.

Playback buffer

Two separate controls — one for Live TV, one for Movies & Series — each choosing how ZapStream balances startup speed against smooth playback:

• Fast start — tunes in quickest and keeps the smallest cushion. This is the default for both.
• Balanced — holds more video in reserve, for a slightly slower start.
• Smooth — the deepest cushion, so a brief dropout is least likely to interrupt playback.

Why there are two of them

Live TV and on-demand pay different prices for a deep buffer. On Live TV, holding a minute of video in reserve means watching a minute behind, which is why many people keep it short; a movie has no “now” to fall behind, so the only cost is a slightly slower start. If your connection drops out often, Smooth on Movies & Series is close to free.

Subtitles

Set subtitle size (Small, Medium, or Large) and how dark the box behind the text should be — None shows outlined text with no box at all, so nothing covers the picture.

Hide quality duplicates

Many providers list the same channel or title several times at different qualities. Pick which of 4K, FHD, HD, SD, and HEVC to hide, and those entries drop out of your lists. 4K is hidden by default, since many TV boxes (including the standard Chromecast) can't play 4K streams — turn it back on if your device handles it.

Display and title cleanup

Category normalization is on by default: it folds your provider's fragmented category list into tidy, grouped rows. Switch it off to get the raw list back everywhere at once. Below it, title cleanup handles providers that pad channel names with clutter — stripping decorative symbols is free, while stripping quality tags like HD/4K and applying your own find-and-replace rule (using a regular expression) are Pro features.

• Example: to remove a “[VIP]” or “[UK]”-style prefix some providers add to every channel name, set the custom rule to find \[.*?\] and replace it with nothing (leave the replacement blank). This strips any text in square brackets, wherever it appears in the title.

DNS

ZapStream resolves hostnames over DNS-over-HTTPS (through Cloudflare, falling back to Google, then to your network's own DNS) so it can still reach your provider when your network's resolver can't. It's on by default; “Disable DoH” switches back to your network's DNS server. Note this is about reaching the server, not about privacy — your connection's destination is still visible to your network.

Category lock (Pro)

Set a PIN and pick categories to lock. Locked categories disappear from browsing and search until the PIN is entered.

Custom lists (Pro)

Build your own named, ordered lists of channels, movies, or series — each one becomes a browsable shortcut pinned near the top of the sidebar. A list can instead be marked Hidden, which removes its items from browsing and search entirely, so you can permanently get rid of content you never want to see.

How the free app is funded

On phones, tablets and iPhone, ZapStream shows a banner ad on the Home screen and an occasional full-screen ad between screens — when you open Live TV, Movies or Series from Home, reload your catalogue, switch profile, or return to the menu after finishing a movie or episode. It never interrupts playback, and appears at most once an hour. The TV versions (Chromecast with Google TV, Android TV, Fire TV) show no ads at all and never even start the ads SDK.

What Pro unlocks

“Pro Lifetime” is an optional one-time purchase — not a subscription. It permanently removes every ad, and unlocks three extra features:

• Custom lists — your own named, ordered lists, plus permanently hiding content you don't want.
• Category lock — PIN-protect categories so they don't show up in browsing or search.
• Advanced title cleanup — strip quality tags and write your own find-and-replace rules.

Where the purchase lives

It's handled by whichever store you installed from — Google Play, Apple's App Store, or the Amazon Appstore on Fire TV. That means it restores for free on a new device on the same store account, but it doesn't carry across stores: buying on Android doesn't unlock the iPhone app, and vice versa.