The guide refresh interval controls how often a player attempts to retrieve updated programme listing data. It affects how quickly newly published schedules or corrections may reach the local guide, but it does not determine how often the source itself updates. Nor does it define how many future days the feed contains. A short interval cannot create missing coverage or repair incorrect channel mapping. Actual refresh behaviour may also depend on whether the app is active, the device is asleep, background restrictions and the application’s retry or caching policy.
Guide refresh interval and Guide coverage
Refresh frequency does not determine how many future days the source publishes.
Publication and retrieval are separate
A guide source publishes data on its own schedule. The player then downloads and processes a version according to its settings. Fetching every few minutes can repeatedly retrieve the same document if the source changes only occasionally. Conversely, a long interval can leave a local cache behind a correction that is already available. Choose an interval with the source’s documented update pattern in mind.
Coverage is a different dimension
A feed containing two future days still contains two future days immediately after a successful refresh. The interval changes retrieval frequency, not the source’s horizon. If the grid becomes blank beyond a particular date, inspect the latest feed’s last programme time. A full week of data that remains blank for one channel instead suggests missing records or an association problem.
Verify actual successful updates
Check the last successful retrieval time where available, rather than assuming the scheduled interval always ran. Sleep and background execution limits can postpone work. After a manual refresh, verify a specific changed programme or the coverage boundary. If the server returns an error, repeated aggressive requests are unlikely to improve the data and may obscure the original failure pattern in logs.
An illustrative example
A source publishes a corrected evening lineup at noon. A player refreshing every six hours may continue showing the earlier version until its next successful retrieval. Refreshing manually can help after publication, but setting a one-minute interval would not make tomorrow’s absent listings appear before the source supplies them.
Practical actions
- Compare refresh frequency with the source’s publication pattern.
- Check the last successful update and feed coverage boundary.
- Verify a specific expected programme change after refreshing.