Categories for xTeVe - Is it me, or has Plex still not added this basic feature?

[garydinsdale]

Server Version#: 1.40.0.7998
Player Version#: Various
Tuner Make/Model: xTeVe
Guide/Lineup name:
Using XMLTV?: Yes

Ok, as Popeye says “That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more”.

I have been using Plex Live TV sporadically for 2 years. I finally found a great provider that I’m happy with, and I now have the same old issue. CATEGORIES!

Now, I got somewhere with this the last time I tried this out. Categories suddenly appeared, but it was based on the program rather than the channel. So if BBC One is playing football, it would be in the Sports category. If it was playing news, it would be in the News category.

I hate that, personally, I just want to be able to make my own categories and put my channels in them. It’s so unintuitive to have to guess what channel your category will be in at any one moment.

HOWEVER - I can’t get THAT functionality back, so I’m now long list of channels in one massive long list. It’s nearly as bad.

So I don’t know if Plex are just messing around with how this works, and I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong (more likely) but what I do know is that this is a feature that is very much needed because it’s the single thing dragging Plex back for Live TV!

xTeVe has the ability to have categories, but Plex doing this would be the icing on this otherwise very nice cake.

Can someone tell me if I’m missing something? I’ve already requested this as a feature a couple of years ago.

See here: Utilise channel categories from XMLTV files
And here: Grouping xTeVe Tuner Channels into Categories on Live TV & DVR?

[BanzaiInstitute]

I don’t think xTeVe is officially supported so it seems unlikely Plex would add features around it.

[garydinsdale]

Oh I get that, but why can’t Plex do this natively? When setting up a tuber, you can map streams to an EPG channel, on the same page, why can’t we simply add them into navigational categories?

[garydinsdale]

Anyone? It seems this functionality would be so easy to implement.

[x1ao4]

If Plex is unable to retrieve channel categories from XMLTV for Live TV, Plex can actually implement custom categories by modifying the favorites feature. The current favorite channels functionality essentially acts as a personal channel list, named “My Favorites.” Allowing users to create multiple channel lists and customize category names would enable users to freely establish channel category lists. This wouldn’t require additional support for XMLTV; rather, it’s about allowing users to create multiple favorite lists, which should be relatively straightforward to implement.

[garydinsdale]

Bingo!

On a side note, I noticed as well that in the XML there is and entries. I think Plex may recognise just but this isn’t a theory I have been able to test yet. Not sure where to XML is that I can edit on my filesystem.