EPG and XMLTV

EPG (electronic program guide) is basically an interactive TV guide, on your computer. It should be integrated with your TV viewing software of choice, and allow you to see and select shows for viewing, or to schedule recording. It all sounds so simple. Your EPG compatible software of choice acquires this programme information from any number of sources (websites), by way of a piece of software called a “grabber”.

Your grabber will connect to a source site, download the EPG information, and export it to an “xmltv” formatted .xml file. (Check here for more info).

Then your TV software should be able to import this .xml file and you should have your EPG!

The big catch is that for some reason, Australian TV companies have decided that this programme information (which is just a collection of facts, and is freely available in print form from many sources) is actually their own intellectual property, and is not to be collected by home EPG solutions (well not for free anyway…). Thusly, many sources have encrypted this information, or change the url of the data frequently, and a few have threatened legal action against grabber software writers. This makes it difficult to get a stable working solution up and running.

MP actually has a built in EPG system that should work automatically based on your location details, but, for some reason it’s not working.

So I got a grabber called “javaxmltvgrabber2”, which is recommended by some people on the Digital Broadcasting Australia forums. I have managed to download and export the .xml, but I’m having difficulties getting MP to import it. Whatever I do, I can’t get MP to show an EPG.

I’m gonna downgrape MP and see if I have a better run.