Guide Info Recommendations? (1 Viewer)

[ChairmanMao]

I live in California (Bay Area, south of San Francisco). I'm looking for recommendations on services/plugins to use to get program guide info for TV recordings. Other than the SchedulesDirect plugin, which is not working in my installation (Win8.1 64 bit, MP 1.6, SD plugin 1.3.0.1 -- during installation the plugin complains that it wants TVService 1.3.x.x when the current version of TVService appears to be 1.6).

What are other people doing for guide information? I'd prefer something that works as invisibly and simply as possible once it is set up, so that it'll have a decent WAF (wife appreciation factor) .

 

[mm1352000]

Choices for guide data in the US:

1. mc2xml + XMLTV plugin
2. WebGrab+ + XMLTV plugin
3. SD plugin

http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/1_MEDIAPORTAL_1/13_Setup_Guides/2_TV_Setup/4_TV_Guide_Setup_(EPG)

The first two are free. They take a bit more setting up the the SD plugin but because they use the XMLTV plugin there is the advantage that you get to control which guide data is linked to each channel.
The SD plugin does work well... if you can get the linkages between the guide channels and MediaPortal channels working correctly. Some people have to edit the TV Server database contents manually to get that sorted:
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...pdated-august-2010.26951/page-84#post-1054743

mm

 

[ChairmanMao]

Well, I guess I'll hope for 3rd time lucky, as I tried the XMLTV GUI and it failed to work as well (I tried to enter my Schedules Direct credentials in the settings. But since there are no labels on the textboxes in the dialog box that comes up I had to guess about what went where, and nothing I tried worked).

 

[catavolt]

Ask your TV stations to transmit proper EPG data, and activate EPG grabber in TVServer config
Or move to Europe, where this is standard since a long time

 

[ChairmanMao]

Ask your TV stations to transmit proper EPG data, and activate EPG grabber in TVServer config
Or move to Europe, where this is standard since a long time

LOL! I tried enabling the EPG grabber at someone else's suggestion just now, and it doesn't work, either. Probably because my capture device is an HDHomeRun Prime, I imagine.

 

[mm1352000]

Ask your TV stations to transmit proper EPG data, and activate EPG grabber in TVServer config
Or move to Europe, where this is standard since a long time

LOL! I tried enabling the EPG grabber at someone else's suggestion just now, and it doesn't work, either. Probably because my capture device is an HDHomeRun Prime, I imagine.

The DVB EPG grabber won't work for ATSC/SCTE EPG. In other words, please disable the EPG grabber. Leaving it enabled can only cause problems.

If it were me in your position, I would be investing my time in figuring out mc2xml.
Even if you can get data from SD, the problem that I have with the plugin is that it attempts to link the guide data to channels automatically... and often fails badly. With mc2xml (or any source that is ultimately imported using the XMLTV plugin) you have all the control.

That's probably about all I can say... except that I really wanted to have CableCARD tuners automatically pulling in EPG data, but it seems like the data is not available (or at least, not available from the cable provider in a standardised way => I couldn't find it).