Features
Recording
Recording is the one feature here that writes to your storage and keeps running when you are doing something else, so it has more ways to go wrong than the rest. All of them report a specific reason.
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Recording works from the guide, from the channel menu, and from a booking screen where you describe a window by clock time. All three need one thing done first.
Set the folder before anything else
Open Settings › Other › Recording. Recordings folder reads Not set on a fresh install, and until it says something else every attempt to record answers Set a recordings folder first.
Choosing it normally opens Android's folder picker. Many television boxes ship without a document picker at all, so the app falls back to a screen that accepts a typed path: Enter path of a folder with recordings or select it. Either way the folder is tested before it is saved: the app writes a small hidden file and deletes it again, because Android reports some folders as writable and then refuses the write. A folder that fails that test is not stored, which is better than discovering the problem an hour into a recording.
Point it at an SD card or a USB drive if the device has one. An hour of high definition television is comfortably several gigabytes, and a Fire TV Stick's internal storage runs out fast.
The two padding settings
Start recording before program start, min and Stop recording after program end, min both offer 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30 minutes, and both default to 0, so the programme is recorded exactly as the guide describes it.
Zero is the wrong choice for anything you care about. Guide times are approximate, live events overrun, and a channel that starts its programme forty seconds early costs you the opening. Two minutes before and five after is a sane pair.
One limit: padding applies only to a recording that has not started yet. Press Record on a programme already on air and it begins immediately, because the minutes before now cannot be captured after the fact.
Recording a programme
Hold OK on a cell in the guide, or on a row in the channel list, and choose Record. On a programme that is on air now you get Recording followed by its name; on one later today, Recording scheduled: and its name.
The first time, a confirmation appears: Recording may not work on all channels and may require more than one server connection. You can change the folder for recording files in the settings. Both halves of that are worth reading rather than dismissing. Don't show again is there once you have.
Record is a toggle. Open the menu on a channel that is already recording and the row reads Stop recording instead, with a confirmation of its own before it stops.
Recording is independent of playback. It keeps running when you change channel, and starting one does not interrupt or change what is on screen, so you can book something on another channel without giving up what you are watching, subject to the connection limit below.
On a channel with no guide data, Record still works: with no programme to bound it, the recording runs from now for a default length. If you want a specific window on such a channel, book it instead.
Booking a window yourself
Custom recording in the same menu opens the booking screen. It is the answer when the guide is wrong, absent, or describes the programme differently from how it actually airs.
Six fields: Start date, Start time, Duration, h:min, Repeat, Name, and Schedule recording to commit it. The same screen lists Scheduled recordings for the channel and gives you All recordings and New recording.
Repeat takes days of the week, which turns a booking into a standing one, a weekday news bulletin, a Saturday fixture. Two details of how repeats are worked out are worth knowing. The next occurrence is found by stepping forward a day at a time rather than by adding a week's worth of milliseconds, so a booking keeps its wall-clock time across a daylight-saving change instead of drifting by an hour twice a year. And the search runs a fortnight ahead, so a week where every occurrence was missed still leaves the repeat alive for the week after.
Holding a cell for a programme that has not started yet narrows the menu: the rows about something on air disappear, leaving Custom recording, which asks for the window outright.
The limits that bite
| Limit | What you see |
|---|---|
| Four recordings at once | Too many recordings at the same time on the fifth. Two-core boxes writing to slow flash are the reason, not bandwidth. |
| Your service's connection allowance | A generic failure on either the recording or the playback. Nothing in the app can raise it. |
| Thirty seconds minimum | A shorter window is not worth a file and is not created. |
| Already booked | This program is already being recorded. |
| Programme finished | This program has already ended. There is no way to record something retrospectively. |
The connection allowance is the one that surprises people. A recording opens a stream of its own, so on a subscription that permits one connection, recording one channel while watching another means two, and your provider will refuse the second. If you record regularly and your service allows a single connection, that is a conversation with your provider rather than a setting here.
While it runs
A recording runs in a foreground service with a notification that carries a Stop action, and holds a wake lock. It therefore keeps going while you use the rest of the app, while you leave the app, and while the screen is off. What ends it early is force-stopping the app, a reboot, or the device losing power.
The growing file size is written back periodically, so a recording in progress shows its size climbing rather than sitting at zero.
Finding what you recorded
Recordings is in the sidebar and on the player's Show menu row. Empty, it reads No recordings. Each entry carries a state:
- Scheduled — booked, not started.
- Recording — running now.
- Completed — finished, file on disk.
- Failed — with the reason attached, listed below.
Files are written as MPEG transport streams with a .ts extension, named for the channel, the programme and the start time: Channel - Programme - 2026-08-20 21-30.ts. The timestamp is in the name deliberately, so two recordings of the same weekly programme are told apart by date rather than by (1) and (2). The stream is written exactly as it arrives, with no re-encoding, so the file matches the broadcast quality and opens in most desktop players.
Delete recording removes a file from the device after a confirmation naming it. Recording file is not available means the row survives but the file does not; usually an SD card that is no longer mounted, or a file deleted from outside the app.
What each failure means
| Reason | Cause |
|---|---|
| Stream unavailable | The channel could not be opened at the appointed time. Provider side. |
| Connection lost | The stream dropped partway. Whatever was written before that point is kept. |
| Could not write to the folder | Out of space, or a card that was removed. Check free storage first. |
| Recordings folder is missing | The folder itself is gone, or the permission granted for it no longer applies. Set it again. |
| Stopped unexpectedly | The service was killed — a reboot, a force stop, or Android reclaiming memory. |
| Missed | The start time passed while the app was not running. |
Two other messages appear at the moment you press record rather than afterwards. Could not start the recording means the attempt failed outright, and Channel is not ready yet, try again means the channel had not finished loading. Wait a second and press again.
Missed is the one worth planning around. Scheduled recordings depend on the device being awake and the app being allowed to run when the time comes, so an aggressive battery saver on a phone, or a television box that fully powers down, will produce it. On a phone, exempting InoxTV from battery optimisation is what makes overnight bookings reliable.