Most often you will probably watch live TV fullscreen. You can perform most actions to control TV directly from the fullscreen display.

Change Channels

There are several easy ways to change channels and select a program to watch.

1. TV Guide - select a program current airing and press Enter/OK to view it.
2. [ Mini Guide|Mini Guide] - from TV Home, press the Channel button, or press Enter/OK while watching TV Fullscreen.
3. Zap channels - using the channel up/down buttons to cycle through channels and display information about what is currently airing or showing next.

Zap Channels

When you use the channel up/down remote buttons (F7/F8 on a keyboard) to change channels, MediaPortal lets you zap through the channels to see what is airing, before actually switching channels.

Most TV cards take a few seconds to switch channels, so channel-surfing is much slower than on a normal TV. MediaPortal takes advantage of this delay to display information about the channel you are about to "zap" to, before actually changing the channel. This display is sometimes called the Zap OSD.

As long as you keep on "zapping" the channel will not change. Once you wait a few seconds the channel displayed on the OSD will be displayed in full screen.

If you know the channel number, as defined in your TV Card configuration, you can select a channel by entering the channel number. Since version 1.1.0, MediaPortal will display the numbers as you enter them.

Mini Guide

If you prefer to change channels by using the Mini Guide, just press Enter/OK to display it when watching tv fullscreen.

Timeshifting

MediaPortal supports timeshifting, which means your Live TV stream is saved to a buffer so you can pause, rewind and fast forward live TV like a video or recorded file.

Whenever you pause, rewind or fast forward using the timeshift buffer, a timeline will display in fullscreen TV.

• White Arrows: Your current position in the time line.
• Red: The part of the show that is not covered by timeshift (the timeshift buffer starts to fill from the moment you switch to that channel).
• Green: The part of the show that is covered by timeshift (meaning you could rewind until the spot where red and green meet).
• Orange: The part of the show ahead from your current position that is covered by time shift (meaning you can fast forward until the end of the orange bar which is the live position of the current TV program. E.g. when you hit pause and resume afterwards).
• 2x: The speed of the rewind.

The timeshift buffer will be kept even when changing channel. For example if you watch Channel A for 10 minutes then Channel B for 10 minutes and then rewind 15 minutes, you'll see the "recorded" timeshift from Channel A while still filling the timeshift buffer with Channel B.

The same time line displays as part of the On Screen Display (OSD).

When stopping timeshifting, a notification is displayed warning that the entire buffer will be removed. To disable this warning, see Settings (in MP) > TV Settings or MediaPortal Configuration > TV > TV Client.
  Tip See Configuration > TV-Server > Timeshifting to configure the buffer location and options for timeshifting.

Display Program Details

At any time, you can display all the details from your TV Guide for the currently playing program. Press Y or the Info/More button on your remote for the On Screen Display (OSD).

Actions Menu

Press F9 or the Info/More button on your remote twice (once for the OSD, then again to display a menu of actions you can perform in fullscreen TV).