Something is not working
Find your symptom, not your theory about the cause. Each page starts with the fix that solves it most often and works down from there.
Narrow it down before you pick a page
Every page in this section starts by asking you to separate the fault from your theory about the fault, so it is worth doing that once here and arriving already half way through. Three questions settle most of it.
- One channel, or all of them? One failing while others play is almost always the stream itself, at the source, and no setting in the app reaches it. Everything failing points at the playlist, the account or the connection.
- Does it fail on a second device too? If the same playlist fails on a phone and on the television, the cause is not the device. Be careful with this test though: plenty of services allow only one or two streams at a time, so the second device can create the failure it was meant to diagnose.
- Is the picture wrong, or the information about the picture? A stream that stalls, stutters or refuses to start is a playback problem. Missing titles, wrong times and empty rows are a programme guide problem. They look equally broken and have nothing to do with each other.
Where the common symptoms go
Picture freezes every few seconds, or the spinner keeps coming back, is buffering and stuttering. One channel that sits black or throws an error while the rest are fine is a channel that will not play. Nothing in the list at all, or an error the moment you save the playlist, is a playlist that will not load. Channels present but the guide blank, stuck on yesterday or shifted by hours is no TV guide data.
If what you are looking at is a feature behaving in a way you did not expect rather than something broken, the page for that feature in features will explain the behaviour, and that is often the whole answer.
Before you delete anything
Reinstalling the app and re‑adding the playlist is the most common first move and one of the least useful. It discards favourites, recordings and every setting you have chosen, and it touches none of the causes above. If you are going to do it anyway, run a backup first: backup and restore covers what is included and what is not.