icetv to stop providing paid EPG information (inbuilt in EyeTV)

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › icetv to stop providing paid EPG information (inbuilt in EyeTV)

TechnoGuy001

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#78347 3-Mar-2011 20:34

It's a shame that the one and only place I know of that provides a 7 day EPG legally for a small price is discontinuing it's service. Im sure it is because of the high prices that the TV companies here in NZ are charging for the EPG info.

Email I got from icetv today:

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#445295 3-Mar-2011 21:04

I just had the same email.

Such a shame, I loved it.

D

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sbiddle

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#445299 3-Mar-2011 21:09

Wonder if they simply didn't get the numbers needed in NZ to make the service pay for itself?

dauckland

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#445858 5-Mar-2011 20:27

I guess so. The forums on their site only have like 4 threads in the NZ section.
But the big question for me now is: what is the alternative?
For my EyeTV it gave me the flexibility of series recording and stuff like that.
Is there an easy, even paid-for replacement?

D

TechnoGuy001

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#445873 5-Mar-2011 22:26

I currently use www.nzepg.org EPG which I have setup a cron job to auto run every day. (but it doesn't have any HD tags)

nzbsgfan

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#446140 6-Mar-2011 22:57

Can anyone tell me how to incorporate this xml into Elgato's software?

I too enjoyed the paid service IceTV were offering - and was gutted when I too received their email.

Cheers

Mark.

hads

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#446146 6-Mar-2011 23:24

TechnoGuy001:
It's a shame that the one and only place I know of that provides a 7 day EPG legally for a small price is discontinuing it's service. Im sure it is because of the high prices that the TV companies here in NZ are charging for the EPG info.

Just to clarify, IceTV didn't/don't pay networks for their data, they generate their own listings.

hads

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TechnoGuy001

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#446166 7-Mar-2011 08:03

@hads, Really, huh, wonder why they stopped then, maybe the TV stations wanted them to start paying for it then...

nzbsgfan: Can anyone tell me how to incorporate this xml into Elgato's software?

I too enjoyed the paid service IceTV were offering - and was gutted when I too received their email.

Cheers

Mark.

I made a little shell script that works on Mac: http://cl.ly/1E0O1K0u0E3N002s0e0H
You will need to edit this script, the 7th line which should look like:
LOCATION_OF_SCRIPT="/dvbt/"
Change the "/dvbt/" to a folder where you want the EPG data to be downloaded to (this is like a temp folder), I put my script in this folder too... so it's all in one place.

Also if you don't have EyeTV installed in "/Applications/EyeTV.app" then you will need to edit the script to point it to your EyeTV.app location.

1, Open up "Terminal" which can be found inside /Applications/Utilities/ folder, or you could do a spotlight search for it.

2, Type the following without the quotes into the Terminal app "crontab -e", then press "i" (to insert text)
3, Paste/type in the following in without quotes "30 0 * * * /dvbt/dvbt_epgupdate.sh" (this is assuming you have placed the script in /dvbt/ folder, you will need to change this to the place you put the script)
More info on crontab to get it to run when you want it to: http://adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference.
My crontab will run every night at 30 mins past midnight.

4, Press "esc" once to exit out of edit mode then press "shift + z" twice to save and exit the crontab app.
5, You can run the script now for the first time to get some data into EyeTV by typing: "/dvbt/dvbt_epgupdate.sh" change this to where you saved the script (should be the same as you put in your crontab).
If you get some kind of permission error then type the following "chmod -x /dvbt/dvbt_epgupdate.sh" and try again.
6, Quit the Terminal app.

7, Go into EyeTV, select "Channels" from the left column and in the "EPG" column select xmltv for each channel, then if it prompts you to select from a list, then choose the channel, if it's not there click cancel and leave it as "none" or set it as DVB. (You should be able to get most of the channels)
It should look somewhat like this when your done:

8, Now go into the "Schedule" and you should see the guide info :)

9, Your done! :)

Let me know if you had any problems.

Regs

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#446170 7-Mar-2011 08:28

TechnoGuy001: @hads, Really, huh, wonder why they stopped then, maybe the TV stations wanted them to start paying for it then...

most likely they had something like 4 subscribers, and 1 full time staff member manually updating their TV guide... the sort of thing that would make it uneconomic to continue providing a service.

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TechnoGuy001

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#446174 7-Mar-2011 08:37

Regs:
TechnoGuy001: @hads, Really, huh, wonder why they stopped then, maybe the TV stations wanted them to start paying for it then...

most likely they had something like 4 subscribers, and 1 full time staff member manually updating their TV guide... the sort of thing that would make it uneconomic to continue providing a service.

You think, damn, but yeah wouldn't expect them to have too many subscribers. I would think it would be cheaper to code up a script to get the data... but maybe not if you had to pay someone to do it.

freitasm

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#446175 7-Mar-2011 08:43

TechnoGuy001:
Regs:
TechnoGuy001: @hads, Really, huh, wonder why they stopped then, maybe the TV stations wanted them to start paying for it then...

most likely they had something like 4 subscribers, and 1 full time staff member manually updating their TV guide... the sort of thing that would make it uneconomic to continue providing a service.

You think, damn, but yeah wouldn't expect them to have too many subscribers. I would think it would be cheaper to code up a script to get the data... but maybe not if you had to pay someone to do it.

You mean, like the EPG Collector, that was developed here, and it's free for users? Seeing it run in Windows, the number of non-Windows users are probably not enough to make it viable for a service like that.

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hads

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#446177 7-Mar-2011 08:45

There have been plenty of alternatives for non-Windows users for quite some time so they probably aren't going to get users there.

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TechnoGuy001

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#446180 7-Mar-2011 08:55

freitasm:
TechnoGuy001:
Regs:
TechnoGuy001: @hads, Really, huh, wonder why they stopped then, maybe the TV stations wanted them to start paying for it then...

most likely they had something like 4 subscribers, and 1 full time staff member manually updating their TV guide... the sort of thing that would make it uneconomic to continue providing a service.

You think, damn, but yeah wouldn't expect them to have too many subscribers. I would think it would be cheaper to code up a script to get the data... but maybe not if you had to pay someone to do it.

You mean, like the EPG Collector, that was developed here, and it's free for users? Seeing it run in Windows, the number of non-Windows users are probably not enough to make it viable for a service like that.

Yeah something like that but built into EyeTV, NZ isn't the only country using MHEG5 or DVB-T so I would think that EyeTV will support MHEG5 epg data at some point...

@hads, Like for Linux users...? not so much for Mac users, as far as I can tell there is only one online xml epg provider left and there is no way of getting MHEG5->xml data natively on a Mac without running some kind of virtualization software, or are you talking about something else?

freitasm

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#446181 7-Mar-2011 08:56

My point was the EPG Collector is free, and my guess would be the majority of HTPC users are running on a Windows platform, so that instantly reduces the need for a service like icetv...

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tokyovigilante

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#446419 7-Mar-2011 19:35

The raw DVB-T stream from EyeTV can be captured using the EyeTV plugin SDK. I did it when I was experimenting with adding live TV support to the Plex media centre.

If EPG Collector could be ported or run under Mono, it's entirely feasible that an EyeTV plugin could be created to automatically extract the MHEG-5 info from the stream, convert it to XML, and import it into EyeTV. I'm planning some further research into this, but am a little time limited.

If anyone has links to a high-level overview of EPG collector, and what it requires in the way of DVB stream length, and from which muxes, that would be very useful.

TechnoGuy001

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#446421 7-Mar-2011 19:47

Didn't know they provided an SDK, but it seems they don't support very many DVB-T sticks: http://www.elgato.com/elgato/int/mainmenu/support/Update-Start/Plug-in-SDK-EyeTV.en.html

Mine for one isn't on that list (hauppauge) :(

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