in my TVH epg, I wanted to be able to provide a user with a playlist file (m3u) and not have to enter a password to play back streams or recordings.
Streams works just fine with persistent auth, so for example this would work
http://tvh:9981/stream/channel/1111111111111111111111111111?AUTH=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
but try as I might I couldn't get recordings to play back without needing to supply a username and password, certainly persistent auth is broken, this won't work:
http://tvh:9981/play/dvrfile/222222222222222222222222222?AUTH=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
so I tried putting in "username:password@", old school embedded authentication creds, and it didn't work either, i.e. this causes VLC to demand username/pass:
http://someusername:somepassword@tvh:9981/play/dvrfile/2222222222222222222222
and then by chance I found that a slightly different URL did work, this one works fine.
http://someusername:somepassword@tvh:9981/dvrfile/2222222222222222222222
So DaveP, you might find this handy with your EPG to allow playback without having to re-authenticate.
BTW, I would recommend created a low-privileged user if you're doing this because you won't want to be putting the admin user/pass into a file which is left hanging around!