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Program Guide and Favorites

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Iain Smith edited this page Aug 28, 2026 · 1 revision

Program Guide, EPG & Favorites

The on-screen program guide works the same way for every live-channel source — M3U, Xtream, Stalker, HDHomeRun — wherever that source actually has EPG data to show (Stalker never does; HDHomeRun only with a paid DVR subscription; see each page for specifics). Plex has no guide at all — it's a library browser instead, see Plex Media Server.

Program guide

Opening and navigating

  • g — toggle the full guide grid: channels down the left, a timeline across the top, a live "now" marker.
  • UP/DOWN — move the channel selection cursor.
  • PGUP/PGDWN — move it a full page at a time.
  • LEFT/RIGHT — page the timeline back/forward by 30 minutes.
  • ENTER — switch to the selected channel and close the guide.
  • i — show full details for the selected programme (poster, synopsis, times); ESC closes that popup, or the guide itself if nothing else is open.
  • MENU (tap) — same as i; MENU (hold 0.5s+) — same as g. The buttons most IR/BLE air-mouse remotes send.
  • b — switch to the last-watched channel (like a TV remote's "last channel" button); repeated presses toggle back and forth.

Outside the guide, i shows a compact current/next-programme banner instead (also shown briefly on every channel switch), with video/audio quality badges — resolution, codecs, fps, HDR, channel layout.

Filtering

  • f — open a text-entry prompt to filter the channel list by name or group (case-insensitive substring match against either, same values --list prints); ENTER applies it, ESC cancels.
  • c — clear any active filter.

Favorites

  • h — toggle the selected guide channel as a favorite (or the currently-playing one, if the guide isn't open); saved to --favorites immediately. A favorited channel shows a heart next to its name.
  • v — show only favorited channels.

Saved to a JSON file keyed by playlist URL/path, so different feeds never share one favorites list (default: ~/.config/tvdinner/favorites.json on Linux, %APPDATA%\tvdinner\favorites.json on Windows; override with --favorites PATH).

In a Plex session, h/v favorite movies/shows in the library browser instead — there's no guide to hold favorites for there.

Correcting a feed's clock

Some feeds report EPG times that don't quite match reality — often by a clean offset, sometimes different per channel (e.g. an East/West regional pair):

  • --time-shift SHIFT — a global correction applied to every channel without its own override, e.g. +1h, -30m, or minutes as a plain integer.

  • --epg-shifts PATH — a JSON file mapping a channel's display name (not tvg_id — real-world playlists commonly share one tvg_id across several distinct channels) to its own shift:

    {"BBC One": "+1h", "TCM US West": "-3h"}

    Default: ~/.config/tvdinner/epg_shifts.json on Linux, %APPDATA%\tvdinner\epg_shifts.json on Windows. A missing file isn't an error; malformed entries are reported as warnings on startup and skipped.

  • [/] — nudge the selected guide channel's shift back/forward by 1 minute, live, writing straight back to --epg-shifts — the fastest way to dial one in while actually watching it drift.

Timezone and caching

  • --tz NAME — IANA timezone for displaying EPG times (e.g. Europe/London); defaults to the system's local timezone.
  • --epg-cache-hours HOURS — how long a downloaded EPG is reused from disk before re-fetching (default: 24).
  • --no-epg-cache — always re-download, and don't write a cache either.
  • --refresh-epg-cache — force one fresh download now, ignoring any existing cache no matter its age, but keep caching normally after that.
  • --no-online-logos — don't fall back to iptv-org's community channel/logo database for a channel with no logo of its own (common for bare M3U playlists); shares the same cache/flags as EPG data above.

Everything else

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