Before you start
- A Roku TV, Roku Streaming Stick or Roku Ultra
- A Roku account signed in on the device
- Your Smart4K server URL, username and password
Nothing to sign in with yet? Take a 24-hour test line first, or pick a term.
Setting it up
Decide which of the three routes this television is getting
Read all three before starting any of them, because the right answer depends on how much that screen matters. Route one is a player from the Roku store, which is the cleanest when your region carries one and unavailable when it does not. Route two is mirroring from a phone or computer, which always works and always ties up the device doing the mirroring. Route three is putting a cheap stick on a spare HDMI input and leaving the Roku for the apps it does well. On a main television, route three is the honest recommendation and the rest of this guide explains why.
Search the Roku Channel Store first
Press Home, go to Streaming Channels or use the search field, and look for IPTV Smarters Player or IPTV Player. If a listing appears, add it, because it is by far the best of the three routes. Availability varies by country and changes without notice, so what a guide written six months ago found is no guide to what you will find today. If nothing comes up, move on rather than sideloading, because Roku genuinely has no sideloading to attempt.
Sign in with your Xtream details
Open the channel, choose the Xtream Codes option, and enter the server address with its http:// and port, then the username and password from your activation message. Typing on a Roku remote is slow and the arrow keyboard makes transposed characters easy, so take it a field at a time and check the server address twice before submitting it.
Set up mirroring as the fallback
Under Roku Settings, System, switch on Screen mirroring. On Android use Cast or Smart View from the quick settings panel; on Windows press Win and K and pick the Roku. Play the stream on that device and the picture appears on the television. It is genuinely reliable as a fallback and genuinely annoying as a habit, because the phone cannot be used for anything else and its screen has to stay awake throughout.
Work out what the picture is actually costing you
Mirroring is not a relay. The phone decodes your stream, re-encodes its whole screen as a second video, and sends that across your wireless network, so a single channel is now being compressed twice and crossing the air twice. On a 4K feed that is a great deal of work for a phone, and the result is softer than the same channel played directly. Compare a mirrored channel with the same channel on any other device in the house and the gap is the argument for a stick.
Add a stick if this is the television you actually watch
A Fire TV Stick at roughly $30 to $50 goes into a spare HDMI port, installs a proper player, and removes every restriction described above in one move. The Roku carries on doing the mainstream apps it is good at and the input button switches between them. If IPTV is the reason that television is on most evenings, this is cheaper than the time spent working around a closed store.
When the picture is wrong
The IPTV channel vanished from the store after it was working
Roku removes these listings periodically and does not announce it, which is precisely why nothing here promises a particular one will be there when you look. Your account is unaffected and no credentials are lost. Fall back to mirroring for the evening, and if the removal sticks, that television has answered the question about whether to add a stick.
The mirrored picture breaks up even on a fast connection
Speed is not the variable here. Mirroring puts two heavy jobs on the same wireless radio at the same time, the phone receiving a stream and the phone transmitting a screen, and they compete. Put the phone on 5 GHz, move closer to the router and close everything else on it. If it still stutters, you have found the ceiling of the method rather than of the line.
Mirroring stops the moment the phone locks
That is the phone doing what it is told rather than a fault. A locked screen is not being mirrored, so the television goes dark. Set the screen timeout to never while you watch and put the phone on a charger, because mirroring drains a battery faster than almost anything else it does. If you find yourself doing this nightly, the phone is telling you to buy a stick.
The player to run on this device
IPTV Smarters Pro
IPTV Smarters Pro on Firestick, Android, Samsung, LG, Apple and PC: install it, enter the Xtream login, set the decoder, open 25,000+ channels.
M3U playlist
Every Smart4K plan carries a personal M3U link to all 25,000+ channels. Where to paste it in VLC, Kodi or Smart IPTV, and why free lists fail.
Every guide
The full list, device by device and player by player.
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Questions people ask about the Roku
Can you actually get IPTV on a Roku?
Partly, and the honest answer is the useful one. There is no sideloading, the store listings come and go by region, and mirroring is the only route that always works. That makes Roku the least dependable platform for this by some distance. Everything about your subscription is unaffected either way, so if you already own one, try the store first and keep mirroring in reserve.
Which Roku models can show the 4K channels?
A Streaming Stick 4K, a Roku Ultra or a 4K Roku TV will output 2160p. The older Express and Premiere models cap at 1080p, so a 4K feed plays and arrives at the panel as HD. Where a player is available in your store, this works the same way it does on any other platform. Where you are mirroring, the phone sets the ceiling rather than the Roku.
Is a Roku TV any different from a Roku stick?
Not in any way that helps here. A Roku TV is the same software with the panel built in, so it draws from the same closed store, allows the same amount of sideloading, and loses the same listings when they are pulled. The one practical difference is that a Roku TV already has spare HDMI inputs, so adding a stick costs nothing but the stick and the input button on the remote.
Is a Firestick better than a Roku for this?
For this purpose specifically, yes, and it is not close. Amazon allows sideloading, so the players worth using can actually be installed, and a Fire TV Stick 4K costs about the same as a Roku of the same generation. For mainstream streaming apps the two are broadly equivalent, which is why keeping both on different inputs is a perfectly sensible outcome.