Grid Guide

The lack of a traditional grid guide has been a huge topic of discussion with HDHomerun DVR, they basically admitted there will never be one due to Rovi patents. Should we ever expect to see a grid guide for Plex live tv?

Anything could happen, but I don’t see one in the near future.

What about something like a list of channels - similar to the “on right now”/“all channels” option, but showing now on and next upcoming.

Then clicking on the individual channel and showing a single list of what’s on that channel for the day?

The HDHR Viewer already does this from my HD Homerun Tuners here in the UK i can scroll down through all 178 Channels and see whats on and messing with the settings i realise i can see what on next,

this is a screen shot of my roku Plex app, accessing the viewer through the channel plug in

it works fantastically

@keithah said:
Anything could happen, but I don’t see one in the near future.

That’s disappointing and will likely relegate the feature to something our family will only use for mobile viewing, until the UI is easy for traditional DVR users to get used to I don’t see it being a widely used platform for day to day viewing. Still glad to the this become an official part of Plex and hopefully over time the integration will improve.

“Olechowski also understands people’s attachment to the traditional grid-based channel guide, and says it’s on the to-do list” -TechHive

So is it on the roadmap or not? The article seems pretty clear that it is but going by the employee comment I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Even if no grid, a list of channels is a must. Or being able to sort/filter/favorite the channels themselves.

For example, the channels I want to see first EVERY time are my OTA HD channels (CBS, NBC, FOX, CW, PBS). The rest are typically not even worth it so 99% of the time I want to see those big names first.

Really, Rovi thinks they own the patent to a guide grid layout, I swear I read that Rovi/Tivo (really Gemstar) patents were thrown out after Amazon and Netflix won their respective cases. Without the date/time grid finding and scheduling content recordings is too difficult to be useful in the Media Center replacement space, in a nutshell the current DVR UI is poor. Charge me more if you need to add a licensed option to pay royalties or find a new display method. However, I would still like to know why NextPVR has the grid (using zap2xml) without paying royalties. I love PLEX and SiliconDust, but both UI suffer from not having the grid, maybe the two companies can team up??

@andrewpmoore@gmail.com said:
What about something like a list of channels - similar to the “on right now”/“all channels” option, but showing now on and next upcoming.

Then clicking on the individual channel and showing a single list of what’s on that channel for the day?

I’ve suggest this in other threads. However, I recommended that when the user drills down to the individual channel that all 12 to 14 days worth of guide data be available for that channel.

When you look at what SiliconDust did with their HDHomeRun DVR software with respect to guide data I think they found a reasonable intuitive alternative to the full screen guide grid.

While I am in favor of a full screen grid guide I’m reasonably sure Plex could come up with something serviceable that can satisfy users without actually using the triditional guide grid as stated above.

There also changes that could be made to the triditional grid guide that would surely sidestep any patient claims. It really just takes some out of the box thinking.

Grid format Guide data is finally here in the web client Version 3.53.7 which is part of server 1.13.2.5154 and I want to offer my sincere thanks to the Plex team for releasing this feature!!!

And it looks good and functions well.
However I doubt most people use the web app to watch live TV. Apple TV has it now as does the Fire line and Shield I believe which is a great start. Roku has a lot of users. Hopefully that platform is very soon. The current thing now is unusable, almost anything would be an improvement.

There’s a roku beta for Plex – it might include a grid guide (I don’t have a roku to test with).

It does not have the guide, but they do have it has something they’re working on.

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I hope it’s soon. I have a bunch of channels now and the guide on the Roku is nearly useless. I want to “cut the cable” but can’t without a functional guide. I may need to switch devices which would be a shame.