This shows up often enough on r/TiviMate that it's worth treating as a known app behavior, not something you did wrong during setup. At least eight separate threads describe the same pattern: a favorites list that empties out, sometimes more than once for the same person. One user reported rebuilding an entire playlist from scratch after it disappeared and only radio channels remained, a more severe version of the same bug. There's no single confirmed cause, so the practical response is keeping a note of your favorite channel numbers somewhere outside the app, so rebuilding the list takes minutes instead of starting from zero every time.

There's a fast way to tell them apart. Switch away from the channel that's buffering, wait a few seconds, then switch back. If it plays cleanly again, the session itself stalled, which points to the app or your local network, not the provider's server. If it buffers again immediately, or a whole group of channels behaves the same way, that's server-side, and no setting on your end fixes it. A live stream arrives in short segments, usually around six seconds each, so a stall longer than that becomes a visible freeze. Some buffering really is capacity on the provider's side, which is exactly why a published uptime number matters.

This is a distinct bug from general lag, and it's worth telling them apart since the fixes differ. General lag means everything feels slow: menus, channel switching, the guide itself. The skip pattern is different, a single remote press jumping 20 to 30 channels forward instead of one. That points to an input-handling issue in the app rather than your connection speed, since bandwidth doesn't control how many channels a button press advances. If you see this specific pattern, trimming the visible channel list helps, since apps holding very large lists in memory, above roughly 18,000 entries, can behave unpredictably.

Neither one setting covers it. Subtitle support splits three ways: subtitles on video-on-demand content, subtitles on live channels, and subtitles rendered by the app's own player versus an external player you've connected to it. A title with subtitles in its on-demand entry won't necessarily show them the same way on a live simulcast, and an external player may need its own subtitle setting turned on separately from the app's. If subtitles aren't showing up, check which of these three contexts you're actually in before assuming setup missed a step or the feature is broken outright.