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[Sandy B Ridge]

Just had a chance to play with EPG Collector. Arbiter on another thread reminded me of its existence.

Wow! Now all the gaps in my EPG have gone. It is so good! The only downside is that it takes ages to collect the data and ties up one of the tuners when doing so.

I'm going to see if I can set up the Windows Scheduler to get the info automatically at a more convenient time when I won't be watching/recording TV, say at 5am every day and only set MC to load the XML when it is run.

The support for the EPG is immense, ATSC, DVB, MHEG etc etc.

Really worth a look for an OTA EPG grabber. It is also Open Source - I haven't located the actual terms of the licensing for it yet, but it is definitely worth exploring integrating this into MC if possible.

SBR

[Arbiter]

I'm glad you like it!


I don't really mind the slow updating process, as it updates at a specific time when i'm at work The reason it takes ages, is because it has to fireup the tuner and scan the frequencies. You can somewhat control that, by manually forcing the frequencies you want to be scanned in the gui. Many DVB-T broadcasters include their whole EPG catalogue into each and every channel they have, so having the application to scan every frequency for the same info is not efficient.



Its plus - as you mentioned as well- is that it has awesome support for every epg format out there and since it fetces info from the broadcaster itself, is the most accurate way to get an xmltv feed



edit: Since it has a post of its own now, i'll post my personal config (suitable for Greek over the air epg) so other fellow users can benefit from it. (the default settings do not work for us )

[Matt]

You can also load over-the-air guide information information inside Media Center.

Unfortunately for ATSC, the over-the-air information is often not particularly detailed.

[Sandy B Ridge]

At least one good thing about the UK regulators is that they mandate at least a 7 day comprehensive EPG rather than just the now & next information.

The settings for DVB-T in the UK were almost correct in the default for me, but I'll happily post my specific settings if anyone is stuck. The only change I needed was to add the Huffman decode for the HD DVB-T2 channnels.

MC won't (yet) get the OTA EPG for DVB on its own. I guess that there's no need to spend much Dev time on it though as this utilty is free, comprehensive and easy to use, and produces a standard xmltv file which MC will use.

SBR