Announcing a Windows utility that will capture the broadcast DVB-T EPG and turn it into XMLTV format.  This may then be imported into MCE using something like QuickGuide.  I developed this primarily to suit my own needs since my Media Center PC is not connected to the internet and it frustrated me that my expensive Media Center box couldn't do what a simple £25 Freeview box can do (i.e. display and use the broadcast EPG).

Two things suprised me when I first started using MCE.  The first was that out of the box MCE as supplied by Microsoft has such poor support for digital TV (no EPG, no interactive services, no subtitles, no now/next, etc).  The second surprise was that, of all the excellent add-ons for MCE that have been developed, there didn't seem to be anything (commercial or freeware) that would capture the EPG as XMLTV format.  The nearest I found was a Linux utility.  On Windows, the only thing I found was old versions of TSReader Lite.  But the XMLTV files produced were buggy.  And XMLTV export has now been removed from the free Lite version.

Hence DVBGuide.

More details here (including zip file download of utility & user manual):

http://www.geocities.com/pclareuk/DVBGuide/

I have limited time to spend on developing this further and fixing bugs.  But I will take note of feedback, bug reports and feature requests if posted here on TGB and propose to make one or a few updates if required before labelling it version 1.0.

New in version 0.85

The main new feature that Version 0.85 brings is support for DVB-C cable tuners in addition to the DVB-T support that has been present in all previous versions.

Whilst problems of DVBGuide not working with a small minority of tuner hardware have not been fully resolved, changes to initialisation and the signal lock mechanism have improved the situation.

Some broadcasters use an alternate mechanism (known as extended event descriptors) to transmit programme event text. Support for this was missing from previous versions of DVBGuide (since initially no broadcaster had been found that used this method). Extended event descriptor support is now present (and confirmed as working with one particular cable EPG that uses them). A related addition is the support for title/description records in multiple languages for a single programme event.

In summary, the changes in Version 0.85 are:

• Support for DVB-C tuners (with associated new command line options to set tuning parameters and a command line option to set DVB type);
• Revised tuner initialisation and signal lock acquisition for better compatibility with a wider variety of tuner hardware;
• Support for extended event descriptors (used by some broadcasters instead of the short text description);
• Support for multiple language title/description records per EPG event.

I hope others find this tool useful.

Thanks for that!  I tried it out and it worked well for me (Crystal Palace is my local transmitter, though, so that's perhaps not surprising).  I ran the app using all the default settings.

I've been a little cheeky.  I'm using DVBGuide to fix a problem in a different media centre (boy it feels good to spell that right) - GBPVR.  I use MCE to look after my NTL box and GBPVR to look after my FreeView.  That way I get to be able to use both analogue and digital in the same box.  The trouble is, GBPVR is a bit hit and miss when it comes to extracting EPG data from the live stream.  From my initial testing DVBGuide is much more reliable than GBPVR's internal code and GBPVR is able to read your XML without any problem.

Would you mind if I cross-posted to the GBPVR forum?  There might even be some scope for some technology exchange between you and the GBPVR developer.

Andy

Hi Andy,

Not cheeky at all.  Since DVBGuide outputs XMLTV format files it is clear that it could be used for other media centre apps.  I just haven't done much testing with anything else other than MCE.  Also, there's obviously less of a need for something like DVBGuide if the media centre app is able to read the broadcast EPG directly.  I hadn't realised GBPVR had a problem with that.  (I have tried GBPVR but not used it in anger).

So, please feel free to cross-post on GBPVR forums.  I'm also happy to discuss how I'm capturing the guide data -- although in essence it's simple: tune to a single mux then capture every EIT packet for current and other transport stream and stop capturing when no new events are being received (i.e. the EPG carousel has fully cycled).

Pete

Hi Pete :

I have tested DVBGuide for DVB-T muxes in Catalonia. It seems to work fine, you did a good job !

I can grab channel listings and programmes. However, and possibly due to regional settings, I can not import the information using Quickguide or BladeRunner. 'Strange' characters in channel names and program descriptions appear. In the xml file, the display-lang=en does not correspond to the broadcasted settings ('ca' or 'es').

Do you think would it be possible to include a command-line parameter to specify the regional settings ?

I've just released a new version that should hopefully work much better for you.  The DVB specification defines a multitude of different mechanisms to handle characters beyond standard 7-bit ASCII.  I've added in support for most of these mechanisms, with the exception of chinese character set support.  In the process, I've learned more than I ever wanted to about ISO8859 and other code page schemes!

Another addition is that the lang attribute in the XMLTV file is now obtained from the broadcast ISO639 code.

The other main change in this new release fixes a bug that users in the UK will have experienced over the last few weeks.  Certain programme events were being transmitted without a title descriptor.  I hadn't forseen this error condition and DVBGuide crashed whilst generating the XMLTV file.  In a related issue, one programme was observed to be transmitted with a title description string, but the string was empty.  This caused invalid XML to be generated (thus confusing QuickGuide).  Both of these issues have been fixed.

Many thanks.  That fixed the problem I was encountering.  Still the best EPG grabber I've found.

Andy

Whoops!  I started development of DVBGuide after British Summer Time had ended so didn't have an opportunity to test with daylight saving time in operation.  I did have some concerns that I might not have got it quite right.  These concerns turned out to be true as I found out on Sunday after the UK had moved from GMT to BST.  All programmes in the EPG are out by an hour (i.e. their times are still in GMT).  That means that if, as would normally be the case, your PC clock is set to BST (or whatever daylight saving time operates in your country) then scheduled programmes and the info shown for live TV will be incorrect.

[Aside: MCE 2005 itself has bugs concerning the transition to/from daylight saving time so I need to isolate those issues from any problems in DVBGuide.]

I am working on a fix, but meantime a simple (albeit non-ideal) solution is to just set your PC clock back to GMT (or equivalent for your country) and just remember to mentally add an hour to all times shown in the guide or the time shown on-screen.  Scheduled recordings should work correctly.

I also discovered this weekend an occurrence of bad XML generated by DVBGuide that QuickGuide refused to parse.  The cause was a bad character in one of the channel names.  I am not sure whether this was a one-off corruption to a data packet (in which case DVBGuide needs to tighten up on its CRC checking) or if it was valid data that DVBGuide isn't currently programmed to handle.  I am continuing to investigate.  But, meantime a fix is to manually edit the offending line of XML to only contain valid characters.

OK, I've fixed the daylight saving problem.  Turns out it wasn't really DVBGuide at fault.  The XMLTV spec says that dates are in UTC unless specified otherwise.  But QuickGuide appears to assume local time and not UTC.  The fix simply adds a "UTC" qualifier to every date/time to make it explicit.

Hello...  (and help!)

I'm slightly confused ... DVBGuide is great, but I use it with Webscheduler, and there seems to be no way in Webscheduler to let it know that the DVBGuide info is UTC time, so it can adjust it.

Therefore, all my EPG data is still an hour out.  How can I amend it (or do something within Webscheduler) to get the data to be BST time?

Best,

gk

OK, I've made a further change that will hopefully lay the daylight saving problems to rest.  [If this fix doesn't work then I'll have to add a command line option to control date format in the XMLTV file.]

This new version also fixes a little problem that people may have noticed in the UK recently.  The broadcast EPG was a bit sparse for a few days on some channels (e.g ITV1).  To fill it up it contained some very long programme events.  Unfortunately, DVBGuide had a bug where it would generate invalid stop dates in the XMLTV file for programme durations longer than 24 hours.  Not usually encountered, but anyway the bug is now fixed.

pclare:

New in version 0.75

Unfortunately, the “UTC” suffix introduced in Version 0.72 does not appear to be understood by all XMLTV parsers. It is hoped that the “+0000” suffix change in Version 0.75 now fixes the problem for all parsers. The changes are:

• All dates in XMLTV file are now specified with the suffix “+0000” to signify that they are specified as UTC rather than local time;
• Bug fix: invalid event stop date in XMLTV file for the (unusual) case of an event duration being specified as longer than 24 hours.

I tried the new version 0.75 but, unfortunately GB-PVR doesn't seem to recognise the Date+0000 format.  It seems to need a space between the date and the plus.  I suspect GB-PVR is in the wrong but, having googled a bit, I can't find anything conclusive.

It's not a big deal because I have a post-processing routine that takes the output from version .72 and converts it into a format GB-PVR can use.  Thought you'd want to know, though.

Andy

Andy Henderson:

I tried the new version 0.75 but, unfortunately GB-PVR doesn't seem to recognise the Date+0000 format.  It seems to need a space between the date and the plus.  I suspect GB-PVR is in the wrong but, having googled a bit, I can't find anything conclusive.

It's not a big deal because I have a post-processing routine that takes the output from version .72 and converts it into a format GB-PVR can use.  Thought you'd want to know, though.

I just re-checked the ISO 8601 spec.  Definitely no space there.  But then the XMLTV spec says date formats are only loosely based on ISO 8601 anyway (which as I've commented before is a rather useless statement).

Anyway, it looks like versions 0.72 and 0.75 of DVBGuide should cover most date format requirements, possibly with the addition of some post-processing.  So, for the time being there doesn't seem to be an urgency for me to do any further changes.  However, I don't like the idea of post-processing being necessary so I think that in a future version of DVBGuide I'll definitely add in a command line option to specify a string to be appended to all dates.

Pete

I've just released a new version of DVBGuide that adds a space in front of the +0000 date/time offset. This should fix the problem with GB-PVR parsing the XMLTV files and, hopefully, won't introduce problems for other parsers.

There's one other significant fix. If a DVB-S or DVB-C tuner was installed as well as a DVB-T tuner used for EPG capture then DVBGuide might attempt to use one of the other tuner(s) before failing. This is now fixed and any tuner that isn't DVB-T is ignored.

More details on the updated first page of this thread and at:

http://www.geocities.com/pclareuk/DVBGuide/

Thanks Pete, works for me.

Andy