Help with EPG - USA OTA (1 Viewer)

[bladecrasher]

I'm a complete newbie user and am not sure a PVR is really possible, but that said, I have MP installed on my laptop and see and hear video from my USB wintv 950q unit. I can't understand though how to get a EPG of some type on my pc. Without that, this is not worth using.

Can someone explain in plain english what steps I should do to setup a epg for USA OTA only.

I have the webEPG plugin installed, but when I scan my channels, I dont' get anything showing? It seems like I need a url or something for a "grabber site", but the only thing I see is a list of cable channels.

What am I not understanding.

Thanks for any input.

 

[GarySeven]

As far as I know, webEPG doesn't work in the USA.
Go to mc2xml and follow the directions for use with MediaPortal. It works for me.

 

[alank]

I also use mc2xml which is free and works well. However you may also want to try the SchedulesDirect plug-in which is a little easier to setup but requires a paid subscription to the SchedulesDirect service. But it's only a couple bucks a year.

 

[moab]

I use MC2XML.
The problem with WebEPG is that they rely on a screen scraping to generate the guide.
The issue with this is that when there is a significant change to the HTML source then the scraper code must be modified.
Also here in the USA there are numerous different localized TV guides that must be scraped from different websites using different scraper code.
Compare this with the UK which has very little regional variation so only 1 screen scraper is required for the entire nation.
That said if someone coded some good scrapers for USA it would be wonderful.