TV Guide Blank or Wrong? Fixing IPTV Listings in Every Major Player

By Zyminex Team · Published September 19, 2026

When the IPTV EPG is not showing, the channels are fine and the listings have gone missing somewhere between our server and your player. That gap has five usual causes: the player never received the guide address, it has not refreshed, the device clock is set to the wrong zone, a channel’s ID does not match its listings, or an old copy of the guide is stuck in the app’s cache. This page takes them in the order worth checking, with the menus for TiViMate, IPTV Smarters Pro and Smart IPTV, and finishes with the signs that the fault is ours rather than yours.

We maintain the Zyminex listings, and most guide questions that reach us are settled on the viewer’s side in a few minutes. Run through the list below before assuming the data itself is broken.

Read the symptom before touching a setting

An empty guide and a wrong guide look alike from the sofa, but they start in different places, and the fix for one can make another worse. Spend thirty seconds matching what you see to a row below.

IPTV EPG not showing at all: the guide address never arrived

Listings do not travel inside the video. They come as a separate XMLTV file from the same server as your channels, and the player has to fetch it and match every program to a channel. How the player learns where that file lives depends on how you signed in.

• Xtream Codes login (server address with port, username, password): the player asks the server for the guide by itself. TiViMate and IPTV Smarters Pro both do this unprompted, which is why we point people to the login rather than the link whenever a player accepts either. The Xtream Codes guide shows where each value goes.
• M3U link (the long get.php address): some players read the guide address from the playlist, some ignore it, and some want it typed into a separate field. If yours has an “EPG URL” or “EPG source” field sitting empty, that empty field is your blank guide. The address is your server followed by xmltv.php, with your username and password attached the same way as in the playlist. Support sends it ready to paste, and the M3U playlist guide covers the players that need it.

The other cause in this group is a switch rather than an address. IPTV Smarters Pro downloads listings but will not show them beside the picture until Settings → EPG → “Enable EPG on live TV” is turned on. If channels play and the grid is empty in Smarters, check that before anything else.

Listings stuck on yesterday: the update interval

A player keeps its own copy of the guide and replaces it on a schedule. If the schedule is too far apart, or the app has not been open long enough to run it, you get last night’s programs on this morning’s grid, or a guide that ends at midnight.

The first download on a new login is always the slowest. A list of 25,000+ channels carries several days of programs for each one, and a streaming stick needs a few minutes to fetch that and a few more to process it. Judge the guide after ten minutes, not after thirty seconds.

After that, set a sensible interval. In TiViMate, Settings → TV guide holds both the refresh interval and the Update now button. Every 12 hours keeps tomorrow’s listings in place before you go looking for them. In IPTV Smarters Pro, the dashboard’s EPG tile (labeled Install EPG in many versions) downloads the listings again on demand. Smart IPTV takes its listings with the playlist, so restarting the app is its refresh.

A stick switched off at the wall cannot refresh on schedule either, so it wakes with whatever it last downloaded. Standby avoids that.

Times that are off: time zone first, time shift second

Every listing in the XMLTV file is stamped with a time and a zone, and the player converts it using the device’s clock settings. When the whole grid is out by an hour, the listings are usually right and the conversion is wrong.

1. Set the device’s time zone by region, not by offset. On a Fire TV Stick it is Settings → Preferences → Time Zone. On Android TV and Google TV, look for Date & time under Settings (inside Device Preferences on older Android TV, under System on Google TV) and let it use the network-provided time zone. On a Samsung television it sits under Settings → General → System Manager → Time; on an LG, on the Time & Date page of the general settings. Choose a named region such as Eastern or Pacific Time rather than a bare GMT offset. A fixed offset does not move when the clocks do, which is why “the guide is an hour out” messages bunch up in the week after daylight saving time starts or ends.
2. Restart the player and refresh the guide. Many players read the clock settings only when they launch.
3. Only then look at the player’s own offset. Some players have a guide time shift or EPG offset in their settings; many do not. It moves every channel by the amount you choose, and it exists for the rare case where the device clock is right and the grid is still wrong across the board.

The offset trap

The error we untangle most often is a global offset used to fix a single channel. The 9 pm film shows at 8 on one channel, so the offset goes to +1 hour. That channel now looks right, and every other channel in the list is an hour wrong. If only one or two rows are out, the device clock is fine and the problem is that channel’s mapping, covered next. Set the offset back to zero before going further.

One channel, wrong programs: channel mapping

Every channel in your playlist carries an ID, and the XMLTV file lists its programs against IDs too. A player shows a channel’s listings only when the two match exactly. Keeping those matches right is the listings team’s daily work, and a broken match is behind most single-channel faults.

• East and West feeds. Many US networks run two feeds three hours apart. A West feed matched to East listings is three hours out on that one row.
• +1 channels. A channel that repeats a sister channel an hour later should carry the same listings shifted by an hour. Matched without the shift, it looks like a clock problem that is not one.
• 4K, FHD and HD versions. The same channel in several qualities should share one set of listings. Now and then one version loses its match after a change upstream and goes blank while its siblings are fine.

Start by checking the sibling versions. If the FHD version has listings and the HD one does not, watch the FHD one tonight and tell us about the HD one. TiViMate also lets you point a single channel at a different guide entry by hand from that channel’s options, a fair stopgap for a channel you watch every night. Most players have no equivalent, and a remap made by hand lives only on that device, so report it anyway: a fix at our end reaches every player in the house at its next refresh.

Clearing a stuck guide, player by player

Sometimes the address, the interval and the clock are all correct and the grid still shows something old or half loaded. That usually means a damaged copy of the guide in the app’s cache. Clearing the cache removes the stored listings without touching your login. Clearing the data is a different button: it wipes the playlist, favorites and hidden groups as well, so keep it for last.

TiViMate

On a Fire TV Stick: Settings → Applications → Manage Installed Applications → TiViMate → Clear cache. On Android TV or Google TV: Settings → Apps, choose TiViMate, then Clear cache. Open TiViMate again and run Settings → TV guide → Update now. The TiViMate guide covers the full setup, refresh interval included.

IPTV Smarters Pro

On Android and Fire TV, clear the cache from the same system menus, then open the app and download the listings again from the dashboard. Samsung, LG and Apple devices have no separate cache button; deleting the app and installing it again does the same job, after which you sign in with the Xtream login and turn “Enable EPG on live TV” back on. The Smarters setup guide shows each screen.

Smart IPTV

Smart IPTV has no login to redo; channels and listings come from the playlist uploaded against the television’s MAC address. On a phone or laptop, open siptv.app/mylist, enter the MAC exactly as the TV shows it, paste the link, tick “Keep online” and send it again, then restart the app. A reinstall or a TV reset wipes the stored list, so either one means uploading again. If channels load and the grid stays empty after a restart, send support a photo of the screen: with Smart IPTV the fix is usually on the link, not the television.

When the fault is ours, and what to send

A guide problem is on our side when it survives every step above and shows up in more than one place:

• The same channel is blank or wrong in two different players, or on two devices, after both have refreshed.
• A whole group has lost its listings at once, rather than one channel.
• The grid still shows yesterday’s programs after a cache clear and an update.
• A channel that had listings last week has none now, and its other quality versions are blank too.

Message us on WhatsApp with the channel name exactly as it appears in your list, the group it sits in, the player and device, and a photo of the guide row. Support runs around the clock, on WhatsApp only. Some channels, mostly small regional and pop-up event channels, have no schedule data anywhere; if one of those matters to you, we will tell you so plainly rather than promise a fix.

Read the grid on your own screen before paying for a year

The 24-hour free trial includes the full guide, the archive and the on-demand library, and activation takes under 15 minutes. Open the grid at the hour you usually sit down, run the checklist at the top of this page if a row looks wrong, and once the listings are right, try the archive icons too: catch-up starts from the same grid. On the pricing page, one screen runs $15 monthly, or $69 when you take the whole year (roughly $5.75 a month), and no plan renews by itself.

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