A TELEVISION IN EORZEA
Aetherstream is a Dalamud plugin that puts a real, working TV in your house in Final Fantasy XIV. The picture goes on an actual furnishing, so the room lights it and people walk in front of it. Watch live TV, YouTube, Twitch, your Plex library, or a bunch of free services. Leave it on one of the channels it makes up itself, with hosts and ad breaks. Or invite friends to watch with you.
WHAT'S ON
Live TV
Thousands of free channels with a guide. Give your favourites numbers and flip through them with the remote, like it's 1998.
Your stuff
Plex, Jellyfin or Emby, and any folder of videos on your PC. Posters, seasons, and continue watching.
Sites and free services
YouTube with your subscriptions, Twitch with who you follow, Pluto TV, Red Bull TV, PBS, NASA+, TED, Dailymotion, South Park Studios, Adult Swim's marathons and the Internet Archive. Or just paste a link.
The station
Channels the set draws for itself from the game's own data. A Namazu cooking your recipes. A moogle painting your sightseeing log. A pixie doing the weather. A kobold running the Gold Saucer numbers. A goblin selling market board items. A tonberry telling stories by the fire.
Music
Lounge music under the channels, or your own folder, a Plex playlist, your orchestrion rolls, internet radio, or a podcast.
Watch together
Make a party, send the six-character code. Everyone who pastes it sees what you're playing on their own screen, in their own house.
INSTALL
It installs through Dalamud's plugin installer like any other plugin. Two minutes.
Add the repository
In game, open Dalamud settings (/xlsettings), go to Experimental, then Custom Plugin Repositories. Paste this, press +, and save:
Install the plugin
Open the plugin installer (/xlplugins), search for Aetherstream, install it.
Turn it on
/aether opens the remote. That's it.
WHAT IT NEEDS
Most of it works with nothing else installed. A few things want a helper on your PC. Setup, behind the gear on the remote, shows you what it found.
Launch the game through XIVLauncher. If you use plugins already, you have this.
These just work.
Press Get yt-dlp in Setup, under YouTube and other sites. No restart needed. Press Update there if YouTube ever stops working.
Press Get Deno on the line below. yt-dlp needs it to get past YouTube's checks.
Your subscriptions and follows come from a browser you're signed in to. Pick it under Setup, Sources. Firefox and its forks like Floorp work directly. Chrome, Edge and Brave need a cookies file exported from the browser.
Press Get ffmpeg in Setup, below yt-dlp and Deno. Joining a party needs nothing.
HOW TO USE IT
Put the picture on a screen
Press the gear on the remote, then Screen, then Known screens, and pick the Everkeep Monitor while standing next to yours. The picture lands on it.
One tip that's worth it: paint the wall behind the monitor black in game. The monitor's screen is an additive effect, so anything behind it bleeds through. A black wall makes it look right.
No monitor? A floating panel works anywhere. It just draws over the world instead of living in it.
Find something to watch
The window is a remote next to a TV. Press Home for the apps, one per source. Paste a link takes anything: a YouTube link, a Twitch channel name, a stream URL, a party code. Fold the window and just the remote stays.
In Live TV, right-click a channel to give it a number. Then the number pad and the channel keys on the remote work on your picks.
Leave it on a channel
The Aetherstream app is the station. Info is what's on, what's up and what it costs. Shows are the ones with hosts, on a schedule, so everyone watching sees the same episode. Ambience is the aquarium, the fireplace and the old screensavers. Music picks what plays underneath.
Watch together
Open Watch party, make a party, and send the six-character code. Friends paste it into Paste a link and see what you're broadcasting on their own screens. The invite can carry your screen setup too, so their picture lands on the same furnishing.
READING THE SET
The screen tells you what's going on the way a TV would.
Nothing's playing. Pick an app.
Connecting. Give it a few seconds.
The stream stopped. Press ↻ on the remote to pick up where it left off.
Something's wrong, and the reason is written right under the words.