USING MC2XML TO MAKE YOUR OWN EPG - tuturial with open discussion
Just thought I would post this for anyone who might be frustrated with EPG descriptions being off. This has driven me nuts in the past and didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason behind it. Some channels would be off an hour and others might be off by 7, 7.5 or 8 hours! I got tired of having a half-populated EPG due to pulls not having any UK data off and on, so I started to pull my own data using mc2xml.exe and tailored the guide to just the channels I have displayed in the pvr. It's relatively easy to set up by using text files to pull only the channels I watch or want to see listed: 1 file to pull the channel data for only the channels I use and 1 file to rename them to what is listed in the pvr for channel names used by NFPS. I have tweaked the channel order and some channel names to display how I want to see things, not the 800-odd channels that are on the server.
Since I got sick of having to resort to IPTV resets and clearing data of TV and Guide databases, since that wipes out all of my customized settings, this is the perfect solution for me and I can pull data on a weekly or biweekly basis, depending on the hardware of the device I'm using.
Prior to my biting the bullet and doing my own data pulls, I first used ninja. It wasn't always consistent and many of the descriptions were just too generic and didn't actually give episode-specific info but were just generic tv programme descriptions from microsoft, while some channels have Spanish descriptions or data for another channel or no data at all. I prefer to know the actual episode data. I used IVUE for quite a while but as with most providers related to anything IPTV, they are constantly changing and many of the channels were just blank and they have way too many updates and the ini creator, etc revealed itself to not be the best solution. Then Andy TV was fantastic until Soloman put up a video on youtube and ticked off the developer and he pulled it from mainstream use. Next, Mayfair TV Guide stepped up to take over and all was good until they too became unstable and then there was TDB and same story. So I said, 'why am I driving myself crazy playing this game relying on temperamental devs when I can just do it for myself and solve all the problems?' But no matter how many times I downloaded the data, there were these crazy time offsets in the different channel streams. I got real tired of IPTV providers thinking that because something is free or cheap that it is OK to offer something that only partially works. It made me want to spit teeth! So I decided to rely on something more reliable - myself!
Back to the issue of the EPG data being 'off' I finally discovered that all I had to do to get the correct settings for the EPG to match the local time was to make sure I was pulling the guide data in UTC rather than local time. I did have to clear the databases one last time and set things back up (again) to how I wanted the channels to appear (or not appear) in the pvr, but now I don't have to wait on anyone to ensure I have a fully working EPG.
I definitely recommend this option for anyone experiencing ANY issues with their EPG. It only takes about 5 minutes each week to get the guide data and all is golden. I've been doing this for a couple of months now and the guide loads every time and is fully populated. Hooray!
