ICEGuide for regional Areas

[kmj495]

I live in the Newcastle NSW area and I find ICEguide painful, because it is not accurate enough in regional areas.
I am sure that there are other regional users that will agree.

It's just not good enough that a user pays service does not have full coverage of major regional areas.  To be truly useful a EPG needs to be reliable.  I know the TV stations change things around and don't broadcast to their own timetables, but to combine this with an inaccurate EPG makes setting up recordings a painful process.

I have a 6 month trial of ICE guide that came with my Topfield 6000.  I did have the download set to Sydney, but I have noticed that I can choose Central Coast. Has this fixed things - well not that I can tell so far.  NBN still shows the wrong info at a quick scan....  I don't know what the difference is between the Sydney guide and the Central Coast one.

Does ICETV plan to have better coverage at any time soon?  If not we probably won't pay for this level of service and renew when the subscription is due.

Karen

[Daniel Hall at IceTV]

Hi Karen,

Do you have any specific examples of incorrect times for the "Central Coast" region?

Also did you change over the channel mapping in the Topfield when changing from Sydney to Central Coast?

If not then you may still be seeing the Sydney guide data as the channels from both the Sydney region and the Central Coast region are included in the Central Coast guide feed.

You can check the guide information that is being used by going through the following steps:

While the Topfield is on and a live TV picture is up on the screen press the “Exit” button on the remote control, this will bring up the “ICE_NET_Loader” menu screen. On this screen scroll down and select “Manual Channel Mapping”.

The screen that comes up will show what guide information will be shown for each of the channels in the Topfield, the left hand column will have the scanned channel names, the right hand column will list the guide information that will be shown for it. Any channel that has “No Mapping Set” in the right hand column will have no data displayed in the guide.

You can change which guide information is showed by scrolling down to the channel and then using the left (V-) and right (V+) buttons on the remote you can scroll through the available guide channels, select the guide channel that corresponds to the scanned channel listed on the left. Once all the channels that you want to see guide data on have a guide channel listed next to it, press the “Exit” button on the remote control to save that list.

You will then need to turn the Topfield to standby and then back on again to load the new settings.

[adrumm]

I know that Sopranos on WIN Southern NSW is always out of sync with Nine in Sydney. I notice that the Wollongong EPG shows WIN Southern NSW - is this actually WIN, or is it just a renamed Nine? If it is truly WIN, could you amend the EPG suggestion for Regional NSW, or split it into northern and southern.

Cheers,

Andrew

[Madeleine IceGuide]

Hi Andrew

Channel 9 is Sydney 9 and WIN is WIN for Southern NSW. The stations are affiliated but the schedules are particular to each channel, not simply renamed.

eg. The Sopranos is on tonight (Monday) on WIN. The same episode screens late tomorrow night (technically Wednesday morning) in Sydney on Channel 9.

Our EPG for Southern NSW/Wollongong includes ABC, ABC2, SBS, SBS2, 7, 9, 10 Sydney, plus Prime Southern, Southern Cross Ten and WIN Southern NSW.

Hope this explains the IceGuide for your area.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask.

Cheers

[Trufflehunter]

I bought a Toppy 7100 a few weeks ago. Love it. Love IceTV.
However, as a Newcastle resident, I have problems with NBN HD and ABC HDTV.

ABC HDTV only lists "Wiggle and Learn", all the time, every day!
NBN HD only lists a couple of programs, about 4 or 5, all from different times on different days.

Not a major problem, because I can just go to the SD channels for the guide or to set the timer. However, if I deliberately want to record the HD broadcast, it involves some manual intervention.

Is this going to be resolved? Is there an interim fix, probably involving remapping channels? If the latter, how do you do that?

[tonymy01]

Look for the 100,000 posts on here regarding ABCHD (ok, slight exaggeration).   There is a very good reason it doesn't have much listed, and that is because it isn't broadcasting any (real) HD shows.   If you want the gaps filled, then tick the option in your account settings to fill the gaps in HD.

[A_G]

I live in regional QLD and have very few issues with Ice. The couple of things that have been wrong, Ice has been contacted and they have fixed it up (usually regarding local news). I have been very happy with the programming. The odd thing that I miss, while it peeves me off, I can live with.