Hey can we get the ability to have the sources in the guide drop-down? I thought for sure there was a way to do it but I can't find anything. I've been trying to do it with channel collections, they just don't play nice with each other once they all get huge. And the time it takes to create them. I haven't been able to create them all without issues arising causing me to have to start over.
Are you talking about the web ui or something else?
The guide collections dropdown box just above the channel logos in the app
App on which platform?
Explain “don’t play nice with each other when they get huge”.
There’s no plans to expose sources like this in the app, especially when you can just do it yourself with collections.
Here are my sources:
So what I'm trying to do is create a collection for each source so I can use the dropdown to choose between the sources. Having this many channels, it takes forever to get around in the guide. All sources are 'ignore m3u channel # '
What I mean by they don't play nice together is I am only able to get one created for Xfinity, pbs, and PlutoTV. Thats when the issues begin. If I choose pbs in the dropdown, random channels that belong to a different collection, or no collection at all will show in addition to the pbs channels I added. I then go and verify I only have pbs in the collection. And for some reason when trying to create a collection for stirr, none of the channels show in the ui to add them.
I think I'm just going to have to start making them all again, and when the issues pop up, gather up concrete evidence to shed some light.
For your M3U channels, do they all have unique channel-id tags? If not, this might explain why your M3U-based channels aren't playing well. Proper support if using playlists requires channel-id tags.
1 Like
What’s that plex m3u and xml? Thanks.
I'm really not sure, time to investigate. You're probably onto whatever the issue is. I'll have to figure that out, or if / when it happens again, look and see.
I'm under the impression it's the free channels offered by a Plex subscription. Here is the m3u / xml
1 Like
So, with all the available lineups that can be used with custom channels, which are frequently changing (remove/add/reorder channels), this still doesn't seem like a bad idea. It took me half a day to create a collection for each source which are all unusable now. There almost 2 thousand channels in my guide. I know plenty of others that have that many as well. The collections are a way to organize them, but I really don't think I'm asking too much to just have the source in the drop-down as a server setting. There's absolutely no way I can maintain collections for every lineup, most of which have hundreds of channels in each.
I'm seriously not trying to cause waves here y'all. There's almost 2 thousand channels in my guide and while the collections is a way to organize them, it is not ideal. I would have to dedicate several hours a week into maintenance to keep them accurate.
2 Likes
I’ve always experienced the same with my m3u sources (in the guide in webUI) but I’m under the impression this is a known bug:
As far as exposing sources in the clients go:
The ability to add a range of channel numbers (or more simply "all from this source") when creating Channel Collections (instead of having to enter them each one by one) would go a long way to making this a practical solution. We could then just make a collection for each new source, channel surf and explore, and prune it down later to remove some channels, all to our liking. Trying to do this now with hundreds (or thousands) of channels, feel like a real chore. The numbers aren't always sequential so it's a clunky and complicated affair.
2 Likes
@maddox -- can you please explain the resistance to expose the sources in the apps?
Is it a technical challenge or a philosophical one? What about an advanced user option to enable sources in the app? Or only in the beta app track?
I'd also like to say that having each source in the app, to me, makes logical sense. Or even having the option to turn on/off specific sources in the app. As pointed out here and in other threads, creating and maintaining custom channel collections for each source is not a workable or user friendly solution. I've tried it, and it takes a long time to click thousands of channels in each source.
At the same time, it's annoying that it's only either/or for custom channel collections OR the default selections (Movies, News, etc) and that we can't have both. I really like using the "Movies" category, but if I use channel collections, that's gone and I don't know how to create a "Movies" channel collection. Is it just all movie channels, or all channels with movies on "right now"? I feel like it's the latter and includes non-movie channels that happen to be currently showing movies.
I understand that on some screens the categories go across the top of the page, and having too many would make that UI element a little awkward. But the utility of having the individual sources available to me far outweighs any awkward UI elements that may be necessary.
Thanks for the consideration.
1 Like
I too would appreciate more/better ways to filter the Guide in the app.
Since filtering by source is already implemented in the DVR Web UI under Live TV > Guide as the leftmost "All Sources" drop-down menu, it would be great to see this existing functionality ported to the app.
Fitting ui into small areas is hard. So is picking things to work on.
Bottom line is, most Channels customers don’t have enough sources to care about this.
So working on this is not a priority. We recognize that some people do have extra needs, so we build features that can help solve multiple problems. We do this with lots of things.
Like I said, make a channels collection for the source.
Is it god awful to do this right now? Yeah. So we’ll try making this part easier at least.
3 Likes
I'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but I do routinely turn on/off specific sources in the app. You can toggle "Enabled" to off in each source. This removes their checkmark on the previous "Manage Sources" page.
This is also how I figured out that that having too many Custom Channels enabled, is what was breaking "On Now" from working in the Top Shelf.
I did note that when I disabled a source, I could still see and access those channels listed in their Channel Collection. They just weren't showing guide data. Anyway, I hope this helps.
This was asked not too long ago and I felt encouraged by the "not yet" answer 
Ok. Well what about the ability to export / import collections? Could be exported to a .csv and imported. One or more of us could work on it together.
1 Like
I should have said 'show/hide' the Sources in the category list. Not really "on/off" although I see what you're saying. I guess I want the best of both worlds -- the existing default categories (All, HD, Movies, News, etc) AND the custom channel collections until such time Sources are available to included there to replace the source collections.
All I know is I'm missing out on discovering new content I (and the lady) might would like to start watching. What's the point of being a cord cutting aficionado and having tons of free content if navigating it all negates the benefits of even having it. Most of us have picky women in our lives who don't want to get used to some cobbled together guide sorting system only for it to either stop working eventually, and always being a WIP.
Would one of y'all mind explaining how I can retrieve a collection I've made in it's native format? Where is it stored? What format? Etc.
I'll just solve this myself. I didn't like the purple, problem solved, except this quirk here, sorting and organization being up to the user to me is much worse than the purple, I could have dealt with the purple. In fact, I'd take the source thing over the carbon theme hands down.
So. I'm proposing that I pull a collection in it's native format, and open up some investigations. The goal being to make the collections in a text editor, and manually push it back where it needs to go. That way I can share the collections. Openly accessible for anyone to help maintain it.