I found the resolution to this issue last year (May 2019) but didn’t think to do a write-up at the time. Another issue involving WireShark refreshed my memory of this IPTV VLC problem on Windows 10 which is why I’m only drawing up this guide now
If you run into this problem you’ll be able to double click on “Network streams (SAP)” in VLC (like you had been able to on Windows 7), however when you try to open your IPTV channel list from the “All” dropdown nothing appears i.e. no channels appear for selection…
To troubleshoot this I monitored Wireshark captures in Windows 7 and compared them to Windows 10 with VLC running and found port 9875 opens on Windows 7 to listen for SAP announcements. This traffic however is dropped by the Defender firewall in Win 10 (confirmed by checking the Win 10 Defender Firewall logs)
Once VLC finds and lists all multicast IPTV streams available and the user selects an IPTV channel, port 5000 opens on Windows 7 to actually play the IPTV stream for the channel chosen. Traffic on port 5000 however is also dropped by Win 10’s Defender firewall
You may have spotted you can still connect to the IPTV stream via udp://@<encoderIP>:5000 in VLC (which confirms the stream is being broadcast) but the IPTV channels themselves aren’t being advertised in VLCs SAP announcements on Win 10
The key here is to understand that Win 10’s Defender firewall is lot stricter in the types of traffic its accepts by default
If there’s no rule in place for ports 9875 and 5000 Win 10’s Defender will drop that traffic. You can test this by disabling Defender then starting VLC again and the IPTV channel list will appear fine on Win 10 (just like it does in Windows 7)
So you’ll need to allow incoming traffic on ports 9875 and 5000 via Group Policy to allow traffic on those ports through (or open them yourself in Defender if your PC isn’t joined to a domain)
