TV Guide

[Rick Evans]

I've been using Jellyfin for the past 6 months with no issues, including populating my Live-TV Guide using an xml.  I haven't tried live TV for a week or so, but today I noticed I can stream the channels, but my guide is completely empty.  I've tried manually refreshing it (with no errors in the log) and it's still empty.  I've tried removing the *channels* files in Jellyfin>cache>xmltv, and then manually refreshing it successfully, but still no visible guide.  I'm at a loss and would love help if someone has something to try.

[TheDreadPirate]

How do you get updates for your TV guide?

[theguymadmax]

Manually check the xmltv file. Is it up to date?

[Rick Evans]

(TheDredPirate)I use an xmltv.xml file that has been working fine for months. (theguymadmax) When you say to check the xmltv file to see if it is up to date; I'm not sure what you mean. Are you suggesting that I need to change my xmltv.xml file occasionally?

[theguymadmax]

When setting up guide data, you need to specify the path to an XMLTV file in Jellyfin. This file is automatically updated through a process you've set up. You don't need to make any manual changes—Jellyfin simply reads the file and processes the updates. However, if the update process fails, the file won't be updated and will contain outdated information, causing it to not populate correctly in Jellyfin. Please check the file and confirm whether it's up to date.

[Rick Evans]

The xmltv.xml file has a modification date of 3/25/25. Since I've run it manually multiple times today, I'm assuming it is not updating. 3/25 is probably the last successful run (even though the log files say every run is successful).

[theguymadmax]

Can you describe the process you use for downloading the xmltv guide data? Do you use zap2xml?

[Rick Evans]

I believe I do use zap2xml. I don't really know exactly what I'm doing and was so happy I got it working - like I said - for months now. Here are the first few lines of the xml file: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<tv source-info-url="http://tvlistings.zap2it.com/" source-info-name="zap2it.com" generator-info-name="zap2xml.py" generator-info-url="github.com/arantius/zap2xml-py"><channel id="I3.1.20492.zap2it.com"><display-name>3.1 WKYCDT</display-name><display-name>3.1</display-name><display-name>WKYCDT</display-name></channel><channel id="I3.2.42697.zap2it.com"><display-name>

---

By the way, is this file supposed to be so big? 7.3 million characters in 7.4MB file.

[theguymadmax]

The size is standard. If you take a closer look at the file, you'll notice the guide data, which looks something like this below. You can tell it's outdated by the date entries in the "programme start" field:

<programme start="20250321170000 -0400" stop="20250321180000 -0400" channel="I3.1.xxxx.zap2it.com"> 


How did you set it up to run? Did you use Docker or another method?

[Rick Evans]

I searched the internet and found clues and tried lots of things. I do have an xmltv.py python file I may have run, but Docker also sounds familiar. Is there a step-by-step guide where I could set this all up again (assuming it would resolve the problem)?