It could be nice to have an option to specify a path to VLC & FFPlay instead of feeding them the tixati_stream playlist, this can be useful especially when using portable versions of the apps. Probably a relative path could be specified, when, TIXATI & VLC both reside under the same directory(on a flash drive), f.e.:
/Portables/TIXATI/tixati_Windows64bit.exe
/Portables/VLC/vlc.exe
So the path to VLC can be specified simply as ../VLC/vlc.exe

Thanks for the suggestion.

This is now available in v2.77.  Go to Settings > Channels > Channel Stream Playback (at the bottom) and press the Configure button.

Relative paths are supported, so this should work well for portable mode.