TV guide data needed

[whurlston]

I have confidence and patience that a solution will be found for us. As a non-programmer, I appreciate your collective efforts very much. I am not unwilling to pay, but my experience with gbpvr.com suggests that the developped plugins are so much more user oriented and friendly. In respect of getting MCE or Vista, I am reluctant to get Vista and I thought you weren't allowed to buy the MCE operating system without buying a computer to go with it.

Even though I'm not Canadian, you're welcome

Actually you can buy any MS OEM software as long as you purchase ANY hardware with it, whether it be a computer, memory or just mouse. (I got that straight from Microsoft). Vista Home Premium and Ultimate now include Media Center and can be purchase in OEM or Retail form (which does not require a hardware purchase).

As for paid epg solutions, once the are released, they will be the recommended solutions (even by me). I just had the ability to do something now and did it.

[zehd]

I have confidence and patience that a solution will be found for us. As a non-programmer, I appreciate your collective efforts very much. I am not unwilling to pay, but my experience with gbpvr.com suggests that the developped plugins are so much more user oriented and friendly. In respect of getting MCE or Vista, I am reluctant to get Vista and I thought you weren't allowed to buy the MCE operating system without buying a computer to go with it.

MCE is an OEM only OS. Which means preinstalled on new Media PC. The (re) installation CD installs as standalone, full, (destructive) install.

There are no legit versions of a Media Center UPGRADE. However there are a couple of registry tweaks that can make a legally owned copy of MCE install as an upgrade. Because MCE is not supposed to install as an upgrade, it may be a breach of license, but I figure if I own it, I'm gonna install it my way...

After the upgrade, the computer appears to be fully licensed and gets all of its updates and passes the Validation...

The tweaks are not for the faint of heart. A simpler approach involves trusting what could be untrustworthy sources, and I wouldn't want to comment on them...

[reboot]

Did you look at this promising solution earlier in this thread http://forums.gbpvr.com/showpost.php?p=2...ostcount=2 I was able to enter my postal code and get listings.

I will stick with whurlston's great solution. I trust it more than html scrapping solutions.

Martin

I read what I could of the thread in the link, and not much of it makes sense to me. I also could not find what "OTA program" is mentioned.

@ sub. Thanks for jumping in here! I'm glad there's something on the horizon that I'll be able to use.

[laserfan]

I read what I could of the thread in the link, and not much of it makes sense to me. I also could not find what "OTA program" is mentioned.

Probably just reading it is not going help--you'll have to actually try following the steps there i.e. "jump in the pool". I think the OTA program referred to is jdonth's Over-The-Air here but it says "not Canada" IIRC.

I share your frustration though as none of the methods that I have found do anything as simple as grab program info for OTA channels, including so-called sub-channels.

But there's a month to go yet before I get kicked-out of zap2it...which btw was a PIA to get running I thought!

[zehd]

Probably just reading it is not going help--you'll have to actually try following the steps there i.e. "jump in the pool". I think the OTA program referred to is jdonth's Over-The-Air here but it says "not Canada" IIRC.

I share your frustration though as none of the methods that I have found do anything as simple as grab program info for OTA channels, including so-called sub-channels.

But there's a month to go yet before I get kicked-out of zap2it...which btw was a PIA to get running I thought!

Setting up Zap2it was a PIA? wow.... try MythTV...

The MCE/Vista solution (if you have either) is quite simple. Yes, it's a list of activities, one to another to another... So far, works great in a batch file.

Whurlston said that he is working on a GUI but side tracked for a bit. I would have been happy to write a gui but no sense being redundant redundant.

For what's it's worth, I'm working on a wiki page that will be fairly straight forward.

North Americans have been completely spoiled by Zap2it. As Canadians we're lucky we even have a solution right now... ( it looked bad for a while)

[laserfan]

Setting up Zap2it was a PIA? wow.... try MythTV...

Yeah, well I think I found exactly one place on the entire Internet that laid-out what I had to do (my ISP forced a solution outside of GB-PVR), and hey, if you haven't written a batch file in 20 years yes it IS a PIA! I may yet do a Myth, if it will run on RH8.0...

As Canadians we're lucky we even have a solution right now...

As Canadians you are lucky to have TV at all!!! I'm kidding of course!!!

[drlava]

I read what I could of the thread in the link, and not much of it makes sense to me. I also could not find what "OTA program" is mentioned.

click the link, which takes you to the second post in the thread, and click the link there. It's a mediaservices.msn.com retriever that does Canada and has nothing to do with MCE.

[dneprrider]

drlava,
I too have tried the Free XMLTV scraper found here:

http://planetreplay.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14314

I think this would be great but I get the error others have been getting:
i.e.
Download retries failed from http://mediaservices.msn.com/DiscoveryWS...6070400000
Error setting headend preferences, aborting.
(I have XXX.XXX out my postal code)

Looking fwd to trying this out successfully.

[reboot]

I tried this, both from command line, and gui and get no providers found.

[zehd]

I tried this, both from command line, and gui and get no providers found.

Try postal code lower case no spaces or dashes...