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[Lester_Jacobs]

Hi All,

Does Media Center support an Electronic Program Guide?  If so, which one?  I live in Canada and find that many of the software PVRs ou there support TitanTV which is of no use to us Canadians.  It would be great if Media Center supported www.zap2it.com listings or some other listings source available to Canada.  Even better would be if Media Center contained an option to import XMLTV listings (http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/).  This way I could independently obtain my listings using xmltv (I am doing this right now) and then have Media Center import the TV listings.

I did do a search and didn't find specific answers to my questions.  I am a long time Musicmatch, ATI Multimedia Center and PowerDVD user.  It looks like Media Center can replace all of these apps with a single intergrated interface.  If so, I'll be buying Media Center (and recommending it to my friends) as soon as it's stable and released.  However I need to get the TV listings issue sorted first.

Cheers
Lester

[JimH]

Hi Lester,
Haven't I seen you on AVSForum?

The subject you raise is very timely.  We're going to have a meeting Monday to try to decide which direction to go in.  We don't currently have an EPG.

I did investigate Tribune Media Services which is also zap2it.  They are reasonably priced for a trial of the service but after the first year, the cost is prohibitive.

We could certainly do an XML approach, but I'm not sure how comprehensive this would be or how well it would suit a novice user.  Thanks for the link.  We'll investigate it.

If you have detailed ideas, we'd really like to hear them.

Jim

[Lester_Jacobs]

Hi Lester,
Haven't I seen you on AVSForum?...

Yes I'm a frequent poster over there.  Well it sounds like there is an opportunity here for me to make some input.  Let me crystallize some ideas and post them back here.  I'll post back here probably within a day or so with what I have.

XmlTV is not too bad for a novice user since Media Center can take care of most of the dirty work internally.

Thanks
Lester

[Ingo]

from a european point of view..... have a look at

http://nxtvepg.sourceforge.net/
http://www.tvtv.de (or probably better readable for you americans ;-) : www.tvtv.co.uk )

Ingo

[Marko]

Great idea this one........

I currently use Digiguide.... http://www.digiguide.com

One of the things it can do if you have the "showshifter" software, is highlight a program in the listing and tell showshifter to record it. Now, I don't have Showshifter, but I do have media Center......

A possibility?

[Lester_Jacobs]

Ok, I've downloaded and played with Media Center for a bit.  In terms of support for an EPG I'd personally like to see an approach that leaves the source of listings as open as possible.  From a novice user perspective, Media Center could support one of the popular listings services (Zap2it and Titan).  However, to maintain maximu flexibility, I'd like to see Media Center also support import of listings in the xmltv format.  Currently I run the XMLTV grabber services periodically to create an XML listings file locally.  I'd like a way to get this XML file into Media Center somehow (preferably automated).  For example I'd like to be able to do something like:

mediacenter.exe -import listings.xml

to import the listings into Media Center.

Regards
Lester

[Topper]

Like Marko I use Digiguide and it works brilliantly. Whether it could be integrated with MC i'm not sure but I'm sure the guys at digiguide could answer that question. Anyway this another vote for EPG.