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Help/Watching and the player/Live TV

Find a channel fast: search, channel numbers and the guide

Five ways to reach one channel out of thousands, including searching by what is showing right now.

2 min readUpdated 20 Sep 2026

A list of twenty thousand channels is only useful if you can reach the one you want in a few seconds. These are the routes, fastest first.

Type the channel number

During playback, press the number keys on the remote. mtivi collects the digits and jumps when you stop. There is also a last channel action that flips back to the one you were on before, and channel up and down move through the current category.

Search by name, or by what is showing

Search in Live TV looks at channel names and at the guide, so typing the name of a match or a film finds the channel carrying it right now. It tolerates misspelling and word order, so tv 2 svt multi still finds SVT TV 2 Multi.

Press the microphone in the search box and speak instead of typing. It uses your device’s own speech recognition.

Favorites and recent channels

Favorites sit at the top of the category list, and recently watched channels are kept on Home. Between them, most people reach the majority of their viewing without searching at all.

The guide

Open the guide, move to the program you want, and press OK to jump to that channel. The guide has its own search box, and it matches program titles as well as channel names.

Tidy names make search work better. If your list is full of tags and country codes, the Title Optimizer removes them so you can type the name you actually know. See Clean up messy channel and movie titles.

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