TiviMate Setup Guide: Playlists, Guide, Groups, Recording
TiviMate is a player, not a service. It holds nothing of its own and shows nothing until you hand it a playlist. What it does supply is a remote friendly interface built for a television rather than a phone, which is why so many people end up using it on a set top box in the living room.
The decisions taken in the first ten minutes of setup determine whether the app is pleasant a year later or an irritation every night. This walks through the whole sequence in order: getting the playlist in cleanly, loading the programme guide, cutting the channel list down to something a household can actually navigate, setting up recordings, and putting the same arrangement on a second screen. At the end there is a straight answer on the paid tier.
Adding A Playlist Without Storing Up Trouble
There are two routes in. One takes a plain playlist link. The other takes a portal address with a username and password alongside it. Where a supplier offers both, the second is usually the better choice, because it hands the app the category structure and the programme data as part of the same handshake instead of leaving you to bolt them on afterwards. Almost every tivimate complaint raised weeks later actually begins right here, in the thirty seconds it takes to type those three fields.
Type slowly and check twice. On screen keyboards insert capitals at the start of a field by default, and a login is normally case sensitive. Copying details out of an email tends to bring an invisible space along at the end. Where a port number is supplied, it belongs on the address exactly as written, with nothing added after it. If you would like the background on how this delivery method works before you start, the reference material on television carried over IP networks covers the terminology you will meet in the setup screens.
Give the playlist a name you will recognise. That seems trivial with one, and stops being trivial the moment you keep a second one running in parallel, which is common while somebody is part way through trying a service out before committing and wants to compare the two side by side on the same television.
Loading The Programme Guide And Keeping It Accurate
A guide arrives as a separate data file, even when it feels like part of the channel list. Portal logins usually pull it automatically. A plain playlist normally does not, and you will need to paste a guide address into the EPG section yourself. Once it is in, set how often it refreshes. Once a day suits most people. Refreshing constantly on an older box just makes the app slow to open.
Two faults come up again and again. The first is a guide that is right but shifted by a whole number of hours, which is a time zone difference and is corrected with the offset control rather than by reloading anything. The second is a handful of channels showing nothing at all while everything around them is populated. That is an identifier mismatch between the channel and the guide file, so the app is looking up a name that the data does not contain. Some channels can be matched by hand; others simply have no entry and never will until the supplier adds one.
Keep the number of days you store modest if the hardware is modest. A guide covering a fortnight has to be read into memory before the interface will paint, and on a small stick that shows up as a long pause on every launch.
Arranging Groups So The List Is Usable
This is the step people skip, and it decides whether anyone else in the house will ever touch the remote. A tidy tivimate channel list is worth more than any other setting in the app. Out of the box you get every category the supplier carries, in whatever order it arrived, including a great many groups nobody in your home will ever open. Half an hour of pruning turns that into something a visitor could operate.
Hide before you sort
Go through the group list and switch off every category in a language nobody speaks or a country nobody watches. Sorting is far quicker once two thirds of the list has gone, and hidden groups can be brought back at any point.
Build one group per person
Custom groups are cheap to make and end the nightly scrolling. One for sport, one for the children, one for whoever watches documentaries. Everybody lands on their own short list instead of the full catalogue.
Fix the order once
Decide whether the list runs by supplier numbering or by name and then leave it alone. Muscle memory is the whole point of a channel order, and it only forms if the arrangement stops moving.
Put a code on what needs one
Adult categories can be hidden outright or held behind a numeric code. In a house with children, do both, and do it before the box goes on the wall rather than after somebody finds them.
Recording, And What It Asks Of Your Hardware
Recording works by opening the channel in the background and writing what comes down to a file, which has two consequences worth understanding before you rely on it. The first is storage. Live television written to disk grows quickly, and the built in memory on a streaming stick will not last long. Point the app at a USB drive or a shared folder on a computer instead, and check the destination is still mounted after any restart.
The second is connections. A recording is a stream in its own right, so recording one programme while somebody watches something else counts as two at once, and most supplier accounts permit only a set number of streams at a time. Schedule two overlapping recordings on a single stream account and one of them will fail, quietly, with nothing on screen to warn you. Check what your account allows before you build a week of scheduled programmes around it.
Scheduling itself is done from the guide, and padding either side is worth setting because live broadcasts drift. The box also has to stay awake. A stick that drops into deep sleep will not wake itself for a timer, so if recording matters, keep it powered and turn off any aggressive sleep option. Hardware that stays on all day is a different class of purchase, and the comparison of boxes that suit heavy daily use is the place to start if the current one is already struggling.
Syncing Screens, And Whether The Paid Tier Earns Its Keep
Anyone who has arranged a channel list once will not want to repeat the exercise on the bedroom television. Syncing exists for exactly that: it carries a tivimate arrangement, including playlists, favourites and interface preferences, from one installation to another so the second screen behaves like the first. Set the main screen up properly, then let the others copy it.
The paid tier is where recording, syncing and running several playlists together generally live, and the free version stays deliberately simple. The honest position is this. One television, one playlist, no interest in recording, and the free version does everything you need; paying adds nothing you will notice. Two or three screens in the house, or anybody who records regularly, and the upgrade repays itself in an evening of not rebuilding the same favourites list twice.
One warning. The app is built around a directional remote and an Android television platform, so it is at its best on that hardware and awkward anywhere else. It is not the right answer for a phone, a tablet or a laptop. If your screen is a Fire device rather than a full Android box, the behaviour differs in small ways that are covered in the notes on choosing a player for a Firestick, and those differences are worth reading before you commit an afternoon to configuration.
Common Questions About Configuring The App
Which devices is this app actually built for?
It is designed around Android television platforms and a directional remote, which includes Fire hardware and most set top boxes running Android. It will install on a phone or tablet, but the layout assumes a large screen and a five way pad, so touch control feels wrong. There is no version for iPhone or for a Windows PC.
My guide is showing programmes at the wrong time. Why?
If everything is out by a whole number of hours, it is a time zone difference between the guide data and your box, and the offset control in the guide settings corrects it in one step. Reloading the data repeatedly will not help, because the file itself is not wrong.
Why do a few channels show no programme information at all?
The identifier attached to the channel does not match anything in the guide file, so the lookup returns nothing. Some can be paired manually in the channel settings. Others have no entry in the data at all, and no amount of refreshing will create one until the supplier adds it.
Can I record one programme and watch another?
Only if your account permits more than one stream at a time, because a recording occupies a connection exactly as viewing does. On a single stream account the second request is refused and the recording ends up empty. Check the limit on your account before scheduling anything important.
Where should recordings be saved?
Not on the internal memory of a streaming stick, which will fill in very little time and then start failing silently. Attach a USB drive or write to a shared folder on a computer that stays switched on, and confirm the location is still reachable after every restart of the box.
Is the paid version worth buying for a normal household?
If you watch on one screen, use one playlist and never record, the free version covers you completely. If there are two or three televisions to set up, or somebody records series every week, the paid tier saves enough repeated configuration work to justify itself fairly quickly.
Do I have to rebuild my channel groups on a second television?
No. Syncing copies playlists, favourites and interface preferences across installations, so the second screen opens looking like the first. Configure the main television carefully, then let the others inherit that work rather than repeating it by hand.
Or see the plans and pricing first.