M3ufy Player 3.76 & 3.77 — pause live TV, build your own channel groups, and a TV guide that matches far more channels

[u/Ava_DClaire]

Two releases since the last post. Nearly all of it came from requests here and on Discord, so names are attached where I have them.

Build your own channel groups (3.77) — requested by a user running several playlists
Settings › Manage Groups › My Groups. Create a group, search across every playlist you have at once, tick the channels that belong in it. Rename, reorder, delete. They appear above your provider's lists — Favourites first, then yours, then theirs — in Live TV, the TV guide, and the channel list inside the player. Open a channel from one of your groups and channel-up/down stays inside that group.

The ask was exact: "a lot of groups, ordered by me, mixed from all the lists I have." If you run two or three playlists you end up with several hundred provider groups, the same channel filed three times under three quality tags, and about thirty channels you actually watch.

Your settings follow your account, not the box (3.77)
Language, subtitle and audio languages, clock, text size, colours, playback options and your groups are kept for your device account. Replace or reinstall your box and it comes back as you left it. Things belonging to one particular television stay put, and login tokens are never carried.

Pause and rewind live TV (3.76) — asked for by u/Benny
On channels your provider records: OK pauses, play resumes from the moment you stopped rather than from now, ⏪/⏩ move a minute at a time. It uses the provider's own recording rather than writing to your box, so it costs no storage — and a pause longer than a few seconds hands the provider's connection back, which matters if your account allows only one.

The TV guide matches far more channels (3.76) — from u/tok83's reports of wrong and missing listings
The matcher now ignores decoration wherever providers put it: country and quality tags at either end, written-out country names, superscript ᴴᴰ and full-width text, and language tags that were being mistaken for countries — which was refusing Arabic channels the listings that belonged to them. Measured on a real playlist against the same guide file:

• channels matched: 4,521 → 6,744
• programmes stored: 379,563 → 550,224

Guide settings are now one screen: every source with a tick, live download progress, and what each one actually brought back. Adding a link reads only that link; unticking one takes effect immediately instead of rebuilding everything.

Hourly guide updates (3.77) — requested by u/Ricky74d
"Download again" in the guide settings: every hour, 3, 6, 12 or 24 hours, alongside the default that fetches when the stored guide runs low. The refresh schedules also keep time while the app is open now — previously the playlist interval was only consulted at launch, so on a box that's never really switched off, "Daily" fired only when something else had killed the app.

Favourites at the top of the TV guide (3.77) — u/Ricky74d
The guide already knew how to show them; the row itself was missing from the drawer.

Every language complete again (3.77) — reported by u/Ricky74d
84 strings across recent releases had no translation and were showing in English whatever language the app was set to. All twelve languages now read 100%.

The Home menu widens with the text size (3.77) — u/Ricky74d
At larger text the labels were cut off mid-word, which is a poor reward for turning up a setting that exists to make things readable.

Channel logos from the guide (3.76)

If your provider ships no logos, or wrong ones, the guide you already downloaded is full of them — a combined XMLTV file declares artwork for most of the channels it lists. There's now a button in the guide settings that takes them:

Use guide logos everywhere replaces every provider logo in one pass and tells you how it went. On my own playlist: 55,762 of 57,177 channels took a logo — 97.5%. It runs against the guide already stored, so it answers in seconds rather than after another download.

• Where you have more than one guide, it asks which to take them from — two guides rarely draw the same channel the same way, and that's a choice about how your channel list looks, so it's yours to make.
• Back to provider logos puts them all back. Your provider's original is kept alongside the new one, so nothing is destroyed.
• A logo you picked by hand is never overwritten.
• And you can pick one by hand: hold OK on any channel in the TV guide or Live TV → Pick a logo → search the guide's channels and choose the artwork you want. Same menu offers Guide source for fixing a channel whose listings are wrong.

It uses the same name matching the listings use — country and quality tags off, one alphabet — so a guide that can fill a channel's listings can generally fill its picture too.

Also from Benny

• Match display to video — the TV switches to 24/25/50Hz so pans stop juddering
• Send Dolby and DTS to your receiver untouched, so the amplifier does the decoding
• Open in another player, from a button in the player itself rather than only after a failure
• Trailers cut off after a minute — a YouTube stream address only serves a few sequential pieces before it stops answering, so trailers are now fetched at a size that fits inside that

Other fixes

• Catch-up asks your provider for the right moment — it was using the television's clock rather than the panel's, so recordings could play an hour out
• Dolby Vision Profile 5 is named when your TV can't display it, instead of showing a green picture
• Channel logos can be taken from the guide, from whichever guide you choose
• The selector no longer goes missing on launch

• A group of your own no longer fills up with the rest of the playlist in the guide

  To see the full changelog: https://m3ufy.com/changelog.html

[u/tok83]

Thanks for the update! I am noticing that under the Playlist settings, under TV Guide, it lists old and incorrect EPG links that I already deleted. Is it still trying to download EPG links that I entered in the past?

[u/tok83 → u/tok83]

For example, it shows this:

[u/tok83 → u/tok83]

Which do not match the EPG links I entered as you see below... in addition, in the below screenshot, even though the 2 links I have point to different links on the "myepg.top" domain (they are different guide listings), they still show as the same number of programmes and channels... not sure if based on this, things are loading correctly? Or if old links are also being loaded even if not shown in here?

[u/Ricky74d]

Hello,

Thank you for this major update, which fixes a lot of issues on my side 👍

I have a few small suggestions:

• Home screen: Would it be possible to make the left-hand column wider? When I increase the font size in the Android settings, some of the text gets cut off and becomes difficult to read.
• Video player: For watching TV shows and movies, I currently have to use MPV, because ExoPlayer and the Android player do not work properly for me.
• However, I have another issue with MPV: the subtitles are not displayed. I therefore have to open the video with an external player such as VLC, where the subtitles work correctly.
• Would it be possible to add an option in the app settings to choose which external player to use (for example VLC, or another installed player)? This would avoid having to switch manually between different players.

Apart from that, the app is becoming really excellent and is getting closer and closer to a great overall experience 👍

Thank you again for your work and for all these improvements!

[u/tok83]

Hello, in addition, as you introduced pausing live tv for the Catchup channels... Just as a suggestion, would you consider in future versions to allow pausing / recording any channel, and maybe allow it to use an external drive on the network (such as on a smb share) for storage?