Features
The TV guide
The guide is a grid of channels against time, and it is the fastest route to the two things worth doing with a programme: reading what it is, and recording it.
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The guide draws channels down the left and time across the top, with the current moment marked. It is a separate screen with its own key map, because the same buttons need to mean different things in a grid than they do over a video.
Moving around it
| What you want | How |
|---|---|
| Next or previous channel | Up and Down, which move the selection rather than switching anything |
| Later in the day | Right, which scrolls the time axis forward |
| A screenful of channels at a time | Pg+(Ch+) and Pg-(Ch-), or Rewind(RW) and Fast forward(FF) |
| Watch the selected channel | OK |
| Full description of a programme | Info or Play/Pause |
| Back to what you were watching | Backspace, or hold Back |
The description panel carries whatever the source provides: year, country, genre, director and cast where they are present, and nothing where they are not. Sources vary enormously in how much they include, and a sparse description is the data rather than a fault.
Groups, which is how a large playlist becomes usable
A playlist of several thousand channels is unusable as one list. Left opens the groups panel, and from then on the grid shows one group at a time.
Three keys open that panel by default (Left, Long Menu and Guide), because it is the panel people reach for most, and because a remote missing one of the three still has another.
Editing groups happens elsewhere. Yellow is mapped to Open group options, and that menu is placed but not yet connected, so nothing happens when you press it. The working route is Settings › Playlists › Manage groups, and it is more capable than the menu would have been:
- A visibility switch per group, plus Show all groups and Hide all groups — so on a playlist with two hundred groups you hide the lot and switch back on the six you watch, rather than turning off a hundred and ninety‑four.
- Groups sorting: By order in playlist, By name or Manual.
- Reorder groups, which becomes available once sorting is set to Manual — a hand‑made order cannot survive alongside an automatic one.
Doing this is the single highest‑value thing you can do to a large playlist, and it is a few minutes of work rather than the hours that going channel by channel would take. The groups you switch off disappear from the guide and from the channel lists together.
What you can do to a programme
Holding OK on a channel, the same gesture as a long press on touch, opens the channel menu. It is divided into three parts, labelled with the programme, the channel and the group it would act on, so it is always clear what a row applies to.
Five rows are wired in this build, and two of them are the point of the menu:
- Record — records the selected programme. It needs a recordings folder first, and says Set a recordings folder first if there is none.
- Custom recording — the booking panel: Start date, Start time, Duration, h:min, Repeat and Name, for a programme the guide does not list or a slot you want every week.
- Add to favorites, Search and Settings — the three shortcuts that save you closing the guide first.
The remaining rows are laid out but not yet connected: Watch from start, the blocking and visibility entries, Assign EPG, the reordering entries and the group entries. They highlight and do nothing. That is deliberate: the menu keeps the shape it is going to have, rather than changing under you as each piece lands. The guide key reference lists them so you do not spend an evening wondering what you are doing wrong.
Hold a cell for a programme that has not started yet and the menu narrows itself: the rows about something on air disappear, leaving Custom recording, which asks for the window outright. Recording is honest about its limits too. The confirmation says it may not work on all channels and may need more than one server connection, which is worth reading before you rely on it. Scheduled recordings report their state as Scheduled, Recording, Completed or Failed, and a failure names its reason rather than leaving you guessing.
What controls the data behind it
The guide is only as good as the source feeding it. Five settings under Settings › TV guide govern that:
| Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| TV guide sources | Where data comes from, per playlist. |
| Past days to keep EPG | How much history is retained. Default 7. Lower it on a device short of memory. |
| Update interval, hours | How often it refreshes on its own. Default 24. |
| Update on app start / Update on playlists change | Extra triggers. The second one is cheap and worth having on. |
| Update TV guide / Clear TV guide | Run it now, or throw everything away and start clean. |
The screen also reports what happened last time: TV guide updated on with a date, or TV guide update failed on with a reason. That line is the first thing to read when the guide looks wrong.
When the guide is empty
An empty guide has three quite different causes: no source configured, a source that failed to load, or a source that loaded but does not match your channels. The third is the confusing one, because the update reports success. Missing TV guide data separates them, and setting up the guide covers configuring a source properly in the first place.