Is there a way to tune directly to a specific channel? And also navigate up and down channels while viewing?
If not, does adding a Kodi front-end enable this on top of plex?
Thanks
Not that i am aware off, the Plex implementation of live tv is sadly limited. Worst of all there is no TV guide which makes finding something to watch/setting a recording very cumbersome. The reason that’s been mentioned here multiple times for the lack of an EPG/Tv Guide is apparently due to a patent!!
This is obviously not true as multiple other apps have TV guides (Emby for example does this very well…in fact the Android tv version puts your most recently watched channels at the top of the guide making for a much better user experience, other examples are Google’s Live Channels app which again shows how a guide should be presented).
The real reason I suspect is that programming a TV guide to be consistent throughout their apps is not trivial…as opposed to doing what they did now and just presenting the channels as if they were part of your tv shows library.
Getting back on topic, if you have a live tv backend setup such as TVHeadEnd then yes that will integrate very nicely with Kodi…allowing almost instant channel changing, the ability to change channel by number, go back to the last watched channel by pressing 0 and also incorporating timeshift and recording. I believe there is also a HDHomeRun backend for Kodi so for now this would be the route to take in my opinion.
What I have settled with for now is using Kodi for live tv viewing and occasionally using Plex to schedule a recording from my iPhone when out and about…however the recordings often fail…so I end up using Kodi to record instead.
So to summarise, plex’s live tv implementation is very much in its infancy (I would say alpha software at best), unfortunately they rolled it out as being a complete product but it’s almost unusable in practice
Siteexperts, I have the same request. As far as I can tell, I can only tune based on Program Guide. It would be wonderful to be able to tune directly to a channel. Last night for instance, I wanted to tune to a football game that was running late. Since the football game was running late, the Program Guide was wrong so tuning to the channel was a guessing game.
Plex creators, is this on your roadmap?
+1 for this… I’m staggered that it’s not there already to be honest… what kind of DVR/EPG is this?!!
Hey guys, a grid-style view of the EPG is in the works. See my update here for more details. It goes over the main reason why this capability hasn’t landed yet.
Thanks, eagerly awaiting the release 
