The guide is empty: how to work out why

An empty guide has 3 possible causes. Separate them before you change anything, because the fix for each is different and 2 of them are not settings.

The file did not arrive. The file arrived and could not be read. The file arrived, was read, and nothing in it matched your channels.

The third is by far the most common.

First: are you looking in the right place?#

On a console, check this before anything else. The schedule lives inside Live TV, not as its own destination. Tune a channel, open the schedule layer, and the shoulder buttons step a day at a time.

The standalone Guide entry in the console's navigation is a placeholder. Opening it and finding nothing says nothing about your guide data. That trips people up often enough to be the first thing to rule out.

Cause 1: the file did not arrive#

Your devices download guide files directly. Our servers never fetch them for you, which is a deliberate rule rather than a limitation, and it has a diagnostic consequence: a guide that works on one machine and not another is a local network problem, not an account problem.

Test it by opening the guide URL in a browser on the machine that is failing. If it downloads there, the app can reach it too. If it does not, the problem is outside the app.

Check the container shape as well. 5 are accepted:

.xml     .xmltv     .gz     .zip     .xz

A URL that answers with an HTML error page instead fails in a way that looks like an empty guide.

Cause 2: the file arrived and could not be read#

Less common than it used to be, and worth knowing about because the failure is dramatic.

A fixture pack of 51 real guide files turned up 3 distinct faults. I did not expect a single byte to take down an entire provider's guide, and every one of the 3 could. An unescaped ampersand in a programme title. A file declaring UTF-8 in its header while carrying Latin-1 bytes in its body. A stray control character in a description.

All 3 are repaired now rather than fatal, and the repairs are counted, so a file that needed patching says so rather than quietly working. On a current version this cause is unlikely.

One shape still worth checking: a compressed guide truncated in transit decompresses partially and gives you half a guide, which reads as "some channels have data and some do not". That has its own article: a guide that stops halfway.

Cause 3: nothing matched#

This is the answer most of the time, and it is not a fault in either file.

A guide is joined to your channel list by identifier. Your playlist says a channel is tvg-id="bbc1.uk", and your guide file has to contain a channel whose id is exactly that. If your provider's playlist uses one convention and your guide uses another, the join produces nothing, and both files are individually perfect.

playlist   #EXTINF:-1 tvg-id="bbc1.uk",BBC One HD
guide      <channel id="BBCOne.uk">      -> no match, no schedule
guide      <channel id="bbc1.uk">        -> match

Symptoms that point here: channels play fine, the guide is blank for all of them or for one group, and the guide file is clearly large when you download it. That combination is a matching problem every time.

Two fixes. If your provider publishes their own XMLTV, use it: their ids match their playlist by construction. Otherwise use the per-channel override, reachable as Fix guide in the Live TV preview header, and point a channel at the right guide entry by hand. That override exists because automatic matching cannot always win. A correction is stored against the channel rather than the source and synced to your account, so fixing a channel once fixes it on every device and for every provider that carries it.

While you are in there#

Two configuration states produce a guide that is slow rather than absent.

Global mode takes up to 15 URLs. Every large national guide you add is a file your device downloads and parses before the guide is complete, so several of them make a guide that fills in gradually. Per-country mode warns above 5 countries for the same reason.

And a first run with a large source takes time: roughly 77,842 titles across about 444 categories is a lot to index. For the first few minutes a guide that is still populating looks identical to one that is empty.

For what the file is supposed to contain, what XMLTV is. If the guide is there but the times are wrong, that is a different problem with a specific cause: why guide times are off.