[mythtv-users] EPG in Australia?

Phill Edwards philledwards at gmail.com
Tue Oct 25 09:50:54 EDT 2005


> IceTV was started as there was no EPG in Australia. The main man behind
> IceTV is Peter Vogel (one of the inventors of the Fairlight CMI). But no we
> are definitely our own company. :)
>
> I think for MS the biggest stopping point would be going to all the effort
> (and cost) of setting up an EPG service from scratch just as a value added
> service for MCE (sure it's pretty damn important but not really critical for
> MCE).

Daniel - I trialled the service you sell tonight and here's some
feedback for you, and for others in the MythTV community as well.

1) When you sign up and provide an email address the web page doesn't
accept email addresses with "+" signs in them. Many valid email
addresses contain a "+" sign so this seems an odd bit of validation to
prevent people from registering with them.

2) There only seems to be program data available for 7 days which is
no different from what is already available for free.

3) Programs are not categorised correctly. For example, all movies are
marked as such by prepending the word "MOVIE:" to the movie name. It
would be more useful if this was recorded as the category type as
MythTV sets this field aside in the database for this type of info.

4) The perl script doesn't allow you to configure what XMLTVIDs you
want to use for each channel which is a pain if you're IDs are
something different to what the perl script assigns.

5) The web UI doesn't allow you to mark certain channels to NOT
download. Eg, I may not want the data for HD channels but it downloads
it anyway which then causes it to be uploaded into the MythTV
database, even though I don't want these channels in there.

6) The information provided generally seems to be no more than what is
already available currently for free.

7) On a more positive note, the download is very fast.

My conclusion is that I can't currently see any compelling reason to
pay over $150/year for the service as it doesn't seem to provide
anything extra than I already get for free.

Regards,
Phill


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