Customise W7MC EPG

Getting the EPG right does take a lot of work, When you go the the setup for Media Center, there is the option to specify your country / region and TV provider. However, these listings were not 100% accurate for my Sky+ package, and load of channels were missing.

XMLTV is the format that W7MC manages its EPG database, so i needed a way to update & add to this dynamically.

First step, is to use Digiguide - http://www.digiguide.com/

This is not free software, but well worth the subscription fee. Thsi will pull the correct TV listing for my area as well ad artwork for TV shows & detailed metadata / show desctiption. This is a standalone application which shows full listings.

Next, we need a tool that will grab all the listings from digiguide & convert it into a format that can be merges into W7MC.

DG2XML is the tool you need.

DGXMLTV was written to translate the UK TV Guide data supplied by DigiGuide.com into an XMLTV format file, suitable for use with SageTV and the excellent XMLTV Import Tool by StéphaneM, which can be found here:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17566

DGXMLTV comes with a skin for digiguide, you need to enable this skin & set password.

open XMLTV GUI - Tools - Settings

C:\Program Files\XMLTV GUI\data.xml

Go to the Grabbers tab - tick & select UK_digi - then below you should have a settings button, this cought me out for ages & drove me mental because I could not find it!! lol

In the settings tab, specify the password you set on the DGXMLTV skin for Digigiude & leave http://localhost:2402/ as is.

back to DG2XML, copy DG2XML.exe to the root of C:

open a cmd, cd to the root of C: and run DG2XML.exe (do a scheduled task to automate this)

when this is finished, you will have a epgdata.xml file in c:

Ok, so now you have your TV listings in xml format running on a schedlued task weekly. Install Big Screen EPG for Windows - then during the configuration you wil lbe asked for your XMLTV source - point it at the location of epgdata.xml

You will now also have a option to schedule this task, again do it weekly after the xml is generated.

Within W7MC, you will probably notice that some of the channels have "no program data" - this can now be resolved by editing the channel & choose channel listings (which is what is generated by Big Screen EPG)

I had to manually map a lot of my channel numbers as well in the DVBlink configuration, this is now easier to do in the latest beta 2.03