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EPG Problems and Solutions

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Yaobing:
As you may have discovered, the default EPG solution "mc2xml" stopped working December 31, 2019.  We have enjoyed free data for many years thanks to Microsoft.  With Microsoft ending Windows 7 support, the EPG data has also ended, unfortunately.

Alternatives
Other than the Over-the-air solution, all alternatives require users to pay a subscription fee to the respective provider. 

1.  Over-the-Air

Over-the-air EPG loading still works for over-the-air channels.  This should continue to work if it has worked for you previously.  The availability and reliability depends on your TV stations.  As far as I know, this should work for North America (United States, Canada, etc.) and South Korea, where the TV standard is ATSC.  It should also work in DVB countries (Australia, European countries etc.).

2.  Perc Data

We have built-in Perc Data support.  Perc Data is a commercial product and you need to set up an account with them and pay an annual subscription fee.  Please check with Perc Data for availability in countries other than the USA.  You will choose your TV lineup on their website after you sign up for service.  Please do not choose more lineups than you need in the interest of conserving network resources.  For example, if you use both OTA channels and cable channels, you can sign up only the cable lineup because cable providers usually include over-the-air local channels.  In MC you can map the same data to both the OTA channel and its cable counterpart.

Inside MC you choose Perc Data option during setup, and MC will prompt you to enter your account name and password with Perc Data.  It will take a few seconds after you enter your credentials, so please be patient.  MC will download the data and try its best to map the new XMLTV IDs to your channels.  However, you should pay extra attention in this step because there may be many channels that MC will fail to match because different EPG data use different ways to present channel names (some use heavily abbreviated form, while some use fully spelled-out names, TNT vs. Turner Network TV for example).

3. Schedules Direct and EPG123

These will also require users to pay an annual subscription fee and setup an account with them.  MC supports these sources via generic XMLTV support.  You should set up your computer to download the data daily by following the instructions of these companies.  You may for example set up a Windows scheduled task to do the downloading.

During MC Setup, choose the XMLTV method.  Specify the location where the XMLTV data file will be found, and MC will load from the file daily.  Again pay special attention at the XMLTV ID to channel mapping stage.

4.  XMLTVListings
Please see below.

JimH:
For questions about specific solutions, please use these threads:

Over the Air (OTA)

Perc Data

Schedules Direct or EPG123

JimH:
Here's an EPG thread at The Green Button:

https://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/viewtopic.php?f=96&t=12391&sid=2c91fd3f78241b70deb8775b919d7a21

And a link to EPG123, which uses the Schedules Direct data and has a support board at the Green Button forum.

http://epg123.garyan2.net/

MrGadget:
The use of Schedules Direct with JRiver Media Center is a violation of their license agreement. It is only licensed for use with approved applications which requires that the application be free, open source, non-commercial.

If the over the air scan does not meet your needs, use Percdata instead.  Practically speaking web site scraping is no longer a good alternative.  Many sites now monitor for scraping and prohibit it.

JimH:
We're not distributing it or selling it.  I don't see the harm.

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