Victories

Well, over the past week or so, I've been trying out a whole heap of other HTPC frontends including GBPVR, Meedio, GotAllMedia, and maybe some others...
I've also been tweaking around with various xmltv data grabbers.
I upgraded my tunercard drivers in there somewhere too...

In the end though, I've gone back to where I started: MediaPortal (0.1.3.0), and the original XMLTV grabber.

First I sorted out my xmltv issues, which basically came down to fiddling with command line switches and stuff, and I whipped up a couple of batch files so I don't keep having to go back to the command prompt for testing.
So now I've got a nice little tvguide.xml that I know is good and working.

I ended up going back to MediaPortal as I had all kinds of issues just even trying to get my TVcard to work at all in some of the other apps, and version 0.1.3.0 seems pretty stable.

The next issue was getting the tvguide.xml to import properly into MP's Electronic Program Guide (EPG). It all seemed so simple. But theres a few little tricks I had to work out to get it going.

It's all about the channel list. This is the list of channels that MP can view

There are 2 ways of getting a channel list into MedaiPortal.
1. Autoscan
2. import from EPG

The first option scans a range of frequencies for channels, and once it has found them, puts them all in a list. The second option imports the list staight from your tvguide.xml file.
The problem with the second option is although it imports the channel names, it doesn't have any channel information with it like frequencies and stuff, which means you have a bunch of channels that you can't use unless you go in and enter all the other data manually... which isn't gonna happen.
So just stick with the autoscan.

The main issue here is that the channel names that come up after doing your autoscan in MPconfig may not match the channel names referred to in your tvguide.xml file. This is an issue as it simply won't know which info goes to which channel when importing to the EPG unless the names are exactly the same.
Now you could go through and edit your .xml and change all the channel references to their corresponding autoscanned names (which I did do a couple of times...), but you'd have to do it every time you ran your grabber as it will just re-write over your changes every time you download new data.

The sensible way to do it, is to go into your scanned channel list in the MP config app, and right click on and change the names of those channels to match your .xml instead. These changes are permanent unless you rescan for some reason, but you can save a copy of this channel list anyway, so you shouldn't need to.


I also had troubles with having too many channels in MediaPlayer. Basically, there's a bunch of HD versions of the channels which I didn't want to see as they don't seem to work properly and really suck CPU cycles, but no matter how many times I unclicked their boxes in the config, they just kept coming up in the main app. I fixed this by deleting all but one of the 'channel groups' in the config (these are used when restricting certain channels but not others with a PIN), and making sure that only the ones I wanted were in the default group.

So now I have only the channels I want, and all the EPG data works.

Now all I have to do is make sure the DVD, MP3, and picture viewing sections work...