[Musicmad]

Hi,

It seems there are two (probably more) ways a standard WMC installation can get EPG data. Either via the standard MS download service or "from broadcaster". In the latter case you have to watch the channel (or MUX - not sure) in actual WMC in order to get the EPG data. Sadly since many channels in Denmark are badly supported by MS, I have to use "from broadcaster" for many of them.

This means that the EPG will not populate in ServerWMC, unless I go into WMC every one in a while and actually watch the channels there.

I don't suppose there is a workaround for that right?

Otherwise - thanks again for this great addition. Still feels like a small miracle to watch fluent HD channels from a 35$ RPi.

[spaceboy]

There are other ways to get guide data into wmc. You could look at big screen epg, any xmltv loader up to something like dvblink which brings stream and epg together in a server setup outside of wmc. Wmc can then be one of many clients. You can go direct from dvblink to xbmc now, with server base time shifting

[Musicmad]

Thanks Spaceboy. It's been a few years since I last looked at Big Screen Epg. I'll have another look. Jumping to dvblink sounds like it will take a few evenings - which I'd rather avoid.

[krustyreturns]

I wonder if this program does what you want (http://sourceforge.net/projects/epgcollector/)? I have no experience with it directly, but another user has complained that epg images downloaded with it don't work in swmc (which we may have just fixed).

[Musicmad]

I wonder if this program does what you want (http://sourceforge.net/projects/epgcollector/)? I have no experience with it directly, but another user has complained that epg images downloaded with it don't work in swmc (which we may have just fixed).

Thanks Krusty. It looked promising until I saw this in the readme.txt "A Microsoft BDA compatible driver must be installed". I'm using 2xFloppyDTV DVB-C tuners and when using them with WMC they don't use a conventional BDA driver. Instead it runs a special driver that emulates a DVB-T signal from the DVB-C (or something). But thanks anyway. I might have to take the plunge with DVBLink TV source at some point, but for now I think I'll just stay with ServerWMC and have my wife use WMC on the serverWMC machine to make sure the EPG is populated.

[scarecrow420]

Being in Australia we dont have digitally downloaded EPG either and have to get it from the OTA broadcasts however I dont have to open up WMC periodically, I only use ServerWMC+XBMC but still seem to have EPG information. I just assumed that the Microsoft scheduling/recording services (which run irrespective of WMC client running) must be grabbing it when they can, using spare tuners etc. I have always wondered how it worked really... Surprised that your EPG data literally "dries up" if you dont open WMC occasionally

[krustyreturns]

Interesting. I wonder if the difference between your setup and musicmad's is that he maybe doesn't have any recordings scheduled. Since the rec service is shut down in that case maybe its not grabing epg data.

[scarecrow420]

If we had to, we could program ServerWMC to fire up a couple of channels during a quiet period at night, I wonder if that would be enough to get the EPG dara? MusicMad - do you have to view EVERY channel in WMC or just some (or just one?). I still dont get how the EPG data is scraped here in Australia, it seems to be available on all channels eventhough we really only watch/record a couple.

[Musicmad]

Thanks Scarecrow.

It's good to know that it can work that way too. I looked into my sources in WMC and it seems that WMC just adds new frequencies as additional sources when channels switch places and this meant that I had 4 sources for some channels where 2 of those sources didn't work. Maybe this is related if it's trying to use those sources in the background to find EPG data. I have cleaned it up and will see if that fixes it.