DVB-S EPG Population - Newbie query

[Graham_Shepherd]

Hi

I installed my sat dish on Monday, installed N-PVR on Tuesday and fitted two Pinnacle DVB-S 4000i cards on Wednesday - lo & behold it's all working!!

I'm glad to have managed to get my Pinnacle 4000i DVB-S cards working fine having used the latest versions/patches for NPVRSetup, NPVRSTmon & NShared.

I've also got installed a Nova 500 T DVB-T card.

All cards have scanned ok and the DVB-T EPG channels are all populated with show details. This happened automatically which was great.

Some of the DVB-S channels give current & next show details in the EPG but otherwise the EPG is empty. On the "channels - settings" page all DVB-t & DVB-S channels are configured to DVB/ATSC EPG.

I'm not sure what options there are for manual channel mappings like there were in GB-PVR and I do not know what the "bulk map" button does.

Is it possible to obtain my DVB-S EPG details in the same simple way that I can with DVB-T channels?

If not can anyone give me a simple step by step guide as to what I need to do please??

Any help would be much appreciated, sorry to be dim - this is my first excursion into satellite tv.

Many thanks

[BigMoose]

UK DVB-S channels only broadcast now/next info in the regular DVB EPG so you will have to use XMLTV to get max 14 days. I use XMLTVGUI for all the UK DVB-S channels with the RadioTimes grabber. The Freesat EPG does broadcast more data and I believe there is an XMLTV grabber/converter for this (others here use it). I dont think GBPVR/NPVR can natively read the Freesat EPG though (would be a handy feature!!).

[sub]

As BigMoose said, its probably case of these DVB-S channels only broadcasting the now/next info rather than a multiday EPG.

Freesat does broadcast a multi-day EPG, but unfortunately its in a proprietary encrypted format so NPVR isnt able to show it.

[sub]

Hi

I installed my sat dish on Monday, installed N-PVR on Tuesday and fitted two Pinnacle DVB-S 4000i cards on Wednesday - lo & behold it's all working!!

I'm glad to have managed to get my Pinnacle 4000i DVB-S cards working fine having used the latest versions/patches for NPVRSetup, NPVRSTmon & NShared.

Great.

[imilne]

DVBGuide can grab the EPG from the broadcast (the entire thing in ~30s too). It writes out an xmltv file that can then be imported straight into GBPVR/NPVR.

Iain

[Graham_Shepherd]

Thanks to all for your help.

The DVBGuide prog suggested by Iain looks ideal as it extracts the data from the DVB-S transmission quickly and easily.

I shall give it a try when I get home this evening and report back.

[BigMoose]

Please do let us know how you got on - I am tempted to switch to it for the freesat channels instead of the RT grabber as it is not always completely accurate. You can always supliment any that aren't on the freesat EPG with the RT.

[martint123]

I'd like to know how it goes as well. Nice to fill in some gaps that the RT don't include.

very handy being able to select EPG's per channel rather than per tuner

[Reddwarf]

I'v run DVBGuide for 4 days now, collecting EPG from both DVB-T and DBC-C and merging them with Xmltvmerge into one file that I feed into NPVR. So far it seems to work excellent on both my setups.

[Graham_Shepherd]

As suggested by Iain & Reddwarf I gave DVBGuide a go and it is so simple.

I used v94 Beta straight out of the box with no mods needed. (The only redundant feature which is not documented is to do with channel logos.)

It very quickly gathered 38000 DVB-S show data records and wrote them to an XMLTV file for me, all in less than a minute :eek:. I now have it scheduled to run each morning with Win XP Task Scheduler.

The link is here if anyone is interested;

http://www.dvbguide.com/

The latest public version is really well documented which is useful.

I do have a bit of a problem updated my n-PVR TV Guide which I detail in the next post. :confused: