Australian EPG fun and games April 25, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : gadgets , trackbackUpdate: Via Om. Yahoo have rebranded Meedio (a PC media centre app they recently purchased) and made it available for free download. Given the relationship between Yahoo and Seven in Australia, perhaps an EPG for 7 might eventuate sometime soon.
I recently upgraded and reconfigured DVB Webscheduler in order to be able to schedule recording of Sydney’s DVB-T stations; mostly the same as the rest of Australia, with the notable exception of Macquarie Digital. For a while I have been using D1’s EPG web service, however it didn’t initially appear to have any data for ABC2*. So I thought I would give IceTV’s EPG service a go, especially since I have been happily using their OS X Dashboard widget. The widget’s hookup to their EPG only brings down one day’s data at a time, which was fine for my purposes. But it looks like IceTV prevent anything other than their widgets from accessing single day data… so no luck getting Webscheduler to access IceTV then.
These sorts of fun and games are well known to any Australian PVR afficionado. There are other solutions of course, such as running your own TV listings scraper to pull data into an XML format, then sit back and wait until the listings are reformatted and break the scraper’s parsing. I could just sign up to IceTV’s 7-day EPG service @ $13 per month. But why don’t the networks just get over their EPG fears and start providing this data for us? At least the ABC provides an RSS feed for their primary channel, although it does not include ABC2. Interestingly, IceTV are planning an IPO in the next few months…
* I’ve since figured it out, in case anyone else is having similar issues. The default value for the Channels lookup (found in Guide Data Source Settings/Web XML Service) needs to be changed to http://d1.com.au/D1xmltv.asmx/GetChannels?region=
Comments»
Hi. Have you tried using the tvguide.org.au data? I used to use it all the time on my TiVo and it’s pretty good (not perfect though).
Checkout http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/000004.html for details.
Cheers,
Mikal