One-Click X2Go, a Real TV Guide, and Everything Else in This Release

This is a big one. QuickBox Pro v3 Core 3.2.2.7323 and v4 Dashboard 4.0.1.3648 are on the stable channel today, and together they carry close to three hundred commits since the last stable release on September 22. Most of that is fixes and polish you'll never have to think about. This article is about the parts you will.

Here's what's in it. X2Go now opens from your dashboard with one click. Live TV gets a proper TV Guide. Dispatcharr becomes a full guide source, and you can connect more than one. Live TV finally shows up properly in your Watch Analytics. App-scoped VPN routing picks up four more apps, plus port forwarding. There's also a Dispatcharr security fix in here, so if you run Dispatcharr, read that section even if you skim the rest.

From the terminal, qb update quickbox updates the CLI and the dashboard together. From the dashboard, open Dashboard > System Dashboard and check the Updates Available panel. When an update is ready, the QuickBox CLI and QuickBox Dashboard rows show up there with an Open Updates link. The full walkthrough is in the Updates & Changelog docs and the qb update CLI reference.

Up to now, connecting with X2Go meant rebuilding the connection by hand from the text the installer printed. That text also said your SSH port was 4747 even if you'd changed it at install time, which sent more than a few people chasing the wrong port.

Now there's an Open with X2Go action right on the App Dashboard. It sits in the actions on your X2Go row, and on the IPTVBoss row too, since IPTVBoss is managed through its desktop editor. Click it and two things happen. Your browser downloads a ready-made session file with your host, your login, your server's real SSH port and an XFCE desktop already filled in. At the same time, a Connect with X2Go Client dialog opens with everything you need to finish the job on the computer you're sitting at.

The dialog picks your operating system for you, with tabs for Windows, Linux and macOS if you need a different one. It lists your connection details (host, SSH port, login and session type, with MATE as an alternate) so you can copy them, and it has a Download X2Go Client link if you don't have the client yet.

There's one first-time setup step per platform, and the dialog tells you exactly what it is:

• ●Windows: the X2Go Client you download for Windows can't open a session file on its own, so the dialog gives you a PowerShell command to run once (no admin needed). After that, session files open with a double-click. If you installed X2Go Client somewhere other than the default, put its location in the X2Go Client location (optional) field first and the command updates to match. Your browser remembers it.
• ●Linux: X2Go Client 4.1.2.3 or newer opens session files directly. On an older client there's a one-time command to run.
• ●macOS: double-clicking a session file doesn't work on macOS, so you either add the session once in X2Go Client using the details shown, or open the file from Terminal with the command the dialog gives you.

Your password isn't in the session file. You type it when you connect, same as always. And on the CLI side, the text qb install x2go prints at the end now shows your real SSH port and points you to the dashboard button, in all seven languages.

Everything about X2Go on QuickBox, including the per-platform steps, is on the X2Go docs page.

If you run Live TV through IPTVBoss or Dispatcharr, you now get a full programme guide right in the dashboard. Open Dashboard > Streaming Dashboard > Control Center > TV Guide. It's an admin page, and it shows up once IPTVBoss or Dispatcharr is installed.

It's the grid you'd expect: channels down the side, programmes across a 3, 6 or 12 hour window, and a line marking right now. You can filter by group, search channels, pick 25, 50, 100 or 250 channels per page (the page remembers your choice), and switch on Hide empty channels so channels without guide data stay out of your way. If IPTVBoss is your source and it knows which provider each channel came from, there's a Provider filter too. Click any programme to see its details and artwork.

The guide is built from the same XMLTV and M3U data your media server uses, so it works the same whether you watch Live TV through Plex, Emby or Jellyfin.

Across the top of the guide is a Live now strip that shows what's being watched at this moment: how many streams, how many channels and how many providers are in use. Channels with viewers get a "watching" badge right in the grid.

Next to it is a Trends tab that looks back over the last 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days. It shows when people watch across the day, then breaks your Live TV down into Top programmes, Top channels, Top viewers and Top providers. Click a channel there and the guide jumps straight to it. A channel is marked as trending when at least two people are watching it at once and that's twice its usual audience, so a channel lighting up for a big game actually stands out.

The full tour is in the TV Guide docs, with the Trends section covering how trending is worked out.

When we added Dispatcharr (here's that article if you missed it), the dashboard mainly used it to fix Plex's guide. Now it's a full Live TV source. Every QuickBox Dispatcharr install on your server is detected on its own and feeds the TV Guide, the details you see on Live TV sessions, and your Watch Analytics, for Plex, Emby and Jellyfin alike. A detected install doesn't need an API key to do that.

You can also connect more than one Dispatcharr. As an admin, open Dashboard > Streaming Dashboard > Settings and find the Dispatcharr card. It lists your connections and labels each one:

• ●Detected on this server for your own Dispatcharr installs. These are guide-only and need nothing from you.
• ●Primary for the connection QuickBox sets up when you install Dispatcharr. Its API key is what keeps Plex's guide pointed at your Dispatcharr channels.
• ●Added for any you add yourself with Add connection, including a Dispatcharr running on a different server.

You can have up to eight connections in total. Give each one a label, a base URL and, if you want live channel details on Plex, an API key. Test checks the EPG, the M3U and the API in one go, so you know straight away whether a connection is good. If you add a Dispatcharr on another server, that Dispatcharr has to allow your QuickBox server first: in that Dispatcharr, open Settings > Network Access and add your server's IP under M3U / EPG Endpoints.

The Dispatcharr docs cover connections, the Plex guide override and the rest of the setup.

Watch Analytics used to treat Live TV as one long session per channel. If someone left a channel on all evening, you got one entry that said nothing about what they actually watched.

There's now a Live TV analytics card in Dashboard > Streaming Dashboard > Settings. Turn on Capture Live TV programme analytics and QuickBox records each programme as its own segment, with how much of it was really watched. A programme watched across more than one media server is counted once. With it on, pick the Live TV filter and Top Titles ranks your Live TV programmes alongside everything else, and they show up in Trending too.

It's off by default, and it starts recording from the moment you turn it on. Live TV history from before that has no programme data. The details are in the Live TV programme analytics docs and the setting itself.

The rest of Dashboard > Streaming Dashboard > Watch Analytics got a lot of attention this cycle as well.

Top Titles now ranks by how many people watched each title and how much of it they finished. Runtime doesn't count, so a three-hour film doesn't win just for being long. A Movies / Series toggle switches between the two, with every episode of a show rolled up under its series, and each card has a media type pill so you can tell what you're looking at.

Over on the Intelligence tab, Trending and Abandoned were rebuilt. Trending shows each title as a cover card, and you can lift the cover to see the details underneath. Abandoned shows where people give up: the titles they stop before finishing, broken down by media type and by library, with the median drop-off point.

The Watch Analytics docs walk through every tab.

Cover art now comes from your media server's own artwork by default. TMDB and TheTVDB are still there if you want them. Turn them on with your own API key in Dashboard > Streaming Dashboard > Settings. Episodes now use their series artwork, seasons have their own, and a series page has a gallery where you can flip through every backdrop your server has for it. Search picks up the series poster for episode results too.

Things link to each other now as well. Across Control Center, the users, devices, IP addresses and titles you see in sessions, recent plays and watch history are clickable and take you to their own pages. Devices got a page of their own, so you can see everything about one device in one place. Media item pages link out to Trakt, and those links always open the right title, right down to the season and episode.

App-scoped VPN routing (System > VPN Control) lets you send one app's traffic through a VPN without putting the rest of your server on it. This release adds rTorrent, Deluge, Transmission and pyLoad to the list of apps you can route, alongside the ones that were already there.

For torrent clients, the app routing card now has a Port forwarding section that knows what your VPN provider can do:

• ●ProtonVPN leases a forwarded port automatically once routing is enabled, and renews it on its own. The card shows the lease as Active, Renewing or Failed.
• ●AirVPN uses a port you set up in your AirVPN account. Enter it in Forwarded port (from your provider account).
• ●NordVPN doesn't forward ports. Downloading, seeding and your ratio all keep working. Your tracker may just show you as not connectable, which only means other peers can't start a connection to you.

Port forwarding needs the WireGuard backend. If QuickBox guesses your provider wrong for a config you uploaded, the Provider override setting fixes it.

If you'd rather set a routed client's listening port yourself, there's a new CLI option for that:

qb manage software -o listen-port -s qbittorrent -u username --port 51413

A few routing fixes came along too. Deluge and Transmission now work properly when routed, and a routed app is reachable on 127.0.0.1 and from your LAN, not just through nginx. Setup and the provider details are on the VPN Control page, with per-app notes on the rTorrent, Deluge, Transmission and pyLoad pages.

We announced this a few days ago, and it's worth saying again because it's now in place. xTeVe hasn't had a release since March 2021, which means no security fixes, so it's out of the QuickBox Pro lineup. In the dashboard it carries a Deprecated badge with a "Migrate to Dispatcharr" hint, and new installs are blocked in both the dashboard and the CLI.

If xTeVe is already installed, it keeps running and you can still update or remove it, so you can move over in your own time. Dispatcharr does everything xTeVe did, and with everything above, a lot more. The xTeVe docs page walks through the move. The same CLI install block now applies to Readarr, which was already deprecated in the dashboard.

Dispatcharr's playlist and guide output. Dispatcharr only serves its M3U playlist, EPG and HDHomeRun tuner to your own network by default. The problem was that QuickBox's nginx config didn't pass the caller's real address through, so Dispatcharr saw every request as coming from the server itself. On installs that aren't behind Cloudflare, that meant the output was reachable from the internet. Now nginx hands Dispatcharr the real address, so your own server and your LAN keep working while everyone else is refused.

The fix is applied when Dispatcharr updates. To apply it now, run:

qb update dispatcharr -u username

If you have a Plex on a different network from your server (Plex at home with QuickBox on a remote seedbox, for example), allow that Plex server's public IP in Dispatcharr under Settings > Network Access > M3U / EPG Endpoints, as a single /32 address. Please don't add 0.0.0.0/0, because that opens your lineup to the whole internet. For player apps outside your network, use Dispatcharr's Xtream Codes login instead. The Dispatcharr docs have the steps.

VPN profiles. WireGuard and NordVPN profiles hold a private key, and they were being written so any account on the server could read them. They're now readable only by their owner and the dashboard service.

Plex token. When an admin mirrors someone's playback in the dashboard to watch along, your Plex token no longer appears in the stream URLs sent to the browser.

Protected-delete logs. Reading and rotating the protected-delete logs now runs as each log's owner instead of root, so a planted link in a user's log folder can't be used to read or rewrite a file it shouldn't.

We also patched several dependency advisories in the dashboard.

• ●rTorrent 0.16.23 is now the default for new installs. Its config uses the newer command names, and if you pin an older version, the config converts back automatically. A clean stop also no longer shows the service as failed.
• ●Plex user lists no longer show nameless accounts, and Delete User and Reset Password are hidden for Plex users, since Plex doesn't let a server admin do either.
• ●Jellyfin now connects with its current token methods, so it keeps working with legacy authorization turned off, which is Jellyfin's default.
• ●Backups: the dashboard can now list and restore the nginx config backups you made from the CLI, and a backup that can't find an app's nginx site now reports the failure instead of quietly succeeding. See application backups.
• ●Deleting a user with qb user delete now cleans up everything that user left behind, including Flood's per-user service.
• ●ruTorrent's disk space plugin works again on servers with quotas, and it stays current through updates.
• ●Plex's version in the dashboard is the version actually installed, not the newest one available.
• ●Plenty of layout fixes for phones and narrow windows across the Streaming Dashboard and VPN pages.

If you only try one thing, try the TV Guide if you run Live TV, or Open with X2Go if you use a remote desktop. And if you run Dispatcharr, update it so the security fix is in place. As always, if something reads wrong or gets in your way, tell us on Discord or GitHub. A lot of what's in this release started as exactly that.