Search

Search is one screen, the same on a phone and on a television, and it looks in four places at once.

Getting to it

There are more routes in than most people find:

• Search in the sidebar.
• A remote key, in all three key maps. It is an assignable action for the player, the TV guide and the movies and shows screens, so you can give it the same button everywhere.
• The Search row in the channel menu, which opens it without closing the guide underneath.
• The search control on the movies and shows screens, and inside their full-screen players.

The screen is built the first time you open it rather than at startup, so the very first open can take a moment longer than the ones after it. That is one less thing loading while the app starts.

What it matches, and what it ignores

The rule is short: your text is matched as a run of characters anywhere inside the name, ignoring upper and lower case.

That is worth spelling out as a list of what it therefore does not do.

Two consequences follow, and they cover most reports of search “not working”. A typo returns an empty result rather than a near miss, because nothing approximate is attempted. And the spelling that matters is the one in your playlist, which is your provider's, not the broadcaster's: prefixes, suffixes and punctuation you would not think to type are all fine in the middle of a match, but a name your provider abbreviated differently from you will not be found by the long form.

Searching part of a word is the way to work with that. A short fragment from the middle of the name beats the full title typed from memory.

The four groups and how much each returns

Results arrive under Channels, Movies, Shows and Programs, and each is capped:

Alphabetical, not by relevance, is the detail that changes how you should type. Search two letters against a large playlist and you get the alphabetically first eighteen channels containing those letters, which are unlikely to be the eighteen you wanted. The cap is not a warning either, so a truncated list looks exactly like a complete one. Three or four characters more is the whole fix.

Programs is ordered by time instead: anything on now or still to come is listed before anything that has finished, and within that, by how close it is to the present moment. A programme title that recurs daily therefore gives you today's showing first rather than a fortnight of identical rows. Each result is grouped under its channel, and a programme your source gave no synopsis for reads No information.

One tab per playlist

With more than one playlist enabled, the results carry a row of tabs, one for each playlist that matched. The caps above are per playlist, so three playlists holding the same channel give you it three times, in three tabs, rather than competing for one list of eighteen.

The tabs also fill in progressively, in playlist order, and there is a reason the first one is always populated first. Everything that can be answered from the app's own database is fetched first, playlist by playlist, and drawn as soon as it arrives: channels, guide programmes, and films and shows for M3U and Xtream playlists, which are stored locally after import. Only Stalker portals need a request to the server for films and shows, and that happens in a second pass afterwards.

So on a Stalker portal the Channels and Programs sections appear immediately and the Movies and Shows sections land a beat later. On an Xtream playlist all four are local and appear together.

Playlists are also searched strictly one at a time rather than together. On a box with a gigabyte of memory, two large catalogues being parsed at once is what ends in a crash, and a search that fills in over a second is a better trade than one that does not finish.

Voice search

The box reads Speak to search, and the microphone starts listening the moment the screen opens. On a remote with a microphone that means one press of the search key and then talking. The first time, Android asks for microphone permission.

Anything you do with the text box stops it: giving the box focus, or typing a character, cancels listening straight away so the two input methods never fight over the field. The microphone button toggles it back on.

Two messages come out of this:

• Microphone permission is required for voice search. — the permission was declined. Grant it in Android's app settings; nothing else in the app uses the microphone.
• Voice search is not available on this device. — there is no speech recogniser installed at all. Television boxes sold without Google's apps often have none, and there is nothing the app can supply in its place.

History

Your last twelve searches are kept and shown whenever the box is empty. Searching for something already in the list moves it to the top instead of adding a duplicate, and case is ignored when deciding that.

The part that surprises people: a term is recorded when you submit it, not while you type. Type four letters, see what you wanted, open it, and nothing is saved, which is usually the behaviour you want, and occasionally not. Press the keyboard's search key to have a term remembered.

The bin icon beside Search history clears the whole list at once. There is no per‑item delete and no confirmation, and the list is stored on the device like everything else, so nothing about it goes anywhere.

When something will not come back

1. Check the tab

   With several playlists, the match may be sitting in a tab you have not looked at.

2. Check the group

   A film is under Movies, not Channels. Providers also classify inconsistently, and a series delivered as one long file lands under Movies rather than Shows.

3. Shorten the query

   Fewer, more distinctive characters from the middle of the name beat the full title. Every character you type has to match exactly.

4. Confirm it imported

   Search only sees what the import stored. If the counts on the import screen finished at zero for the section you are searching, the content is not on the device to be found.

Searching for a group name is the one case worth naming again, because it feels like it ought to work. Groups are chosen from the channel list, and hiding the ones you never watch does more for a large playlist than any search ever will.