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I wanted to post about the fantastic support I've just received from Matt at IceTV.

Matt sorted out my subscription problems quickly, and his e-mail was friendly and helpful.

Great service from IceTV.

I have no hesitation in recommending IceTV - especially for your non-technical friends and family.

Obviously (for those who remember QuickGuide) I have the technical savvy to set up and maintain a guide service for MCE or a PVR, but the thing about IceTV is that I use their service, and I don't have to think about it - it just works.  Easy to recommend to my parents, who still can't program the PVR.

Highly recommended.

BJ

Just re-setup my TV settings (still haven't got through to get the hot-fix during business hours), and ABC TV Melbourne has downloaded in the guide (as the channel name is there to map guide listings to a channel), but no data is available at all.

Just re-downloaded to check, and still no go.

Just downloaded again today following the "It's live" announcement.

I notice the installer PIMP_My_MCE is showing a modified date of 30/07/2006 19:00 - which seems a while ago, but anyway.

I ran it, and got the following error:

Code Select Expand

Error Code: -5009 : 0x8002802b
Error Information:
>Ctor\ObjectWrapper.cpp (163)
>Ctor\ObjectWrapper.cpp (402)
>Kernel\Component.cpp (1163)
>Kernel\CABFile.cpp (389)
>SetupDLL\SetupDLL.cpp (1541)
PAPP:PIMP my MCE
PVENDOR:IceTV (http://www.IceTV.com)
PGUID:A39E0D36-6EF2-4B2E-97BB-8AD13AB12590
$11.50.0.42618PAK
@Windows XP Service Pack 2 (2600) IE 7.0.5730.11

Where is this at?

The first beta's allowed you to specify a device ID in the client GUI.

Now you can create and delete devices on the website.  However, the issue appears to be that there is no way to associate a device on the website with a specific instance of PIMP running on a specific MCE.

What that means for me is if I have PIMP enabled and running on only one MCE, all is good, but the moment I have more than once MCE, it doesn't seem to work - schedules on PIMP disappear.

Add an option to the systray icon to go directly to the PIMP website and be automatically logged in.

The reasoning - sometimes I just want to check what is scheduled in MCE (on my Desktop, rather than my HTPC), and rather than fire up MCE which takes a little while, and conflicts with other programs that might be displaying video, for example, I log into the PIMP web site.  However, if I didn't have to log in, that would be one step better.

I've got my various PCs set to observe DST.

For the last few days, I've noticed that the times scheduled in the guide for shows after the changeover to DST were an hour forward - e.g. ABC News that would be at 7pm showed up at 8pm in the guide.

I also noticed that the guide display "knew" about the DST cutover - shows ended at 2am on Sunday morning, but the next show started at 3am.

I figured everything would be OK this morning - but it's not.  Shows that should start at 7:30, show up as starting at 8:30.

If I set my PC clock to not observe DST, (and the time is an hour earlier on my PC), then the times displayed are correct - e.g. a show that should start at 7:30 shows that it will start at 7:30 - but of course when my PC thinks it's 7:30, it's already 8:30.

If I set my PC clock to not observe DST - and set the time to the correct DST time, it's all OK - shows schedule correctly.  The problem with that, of course, is that all the DST aware applications don't work correctly - so appointments with people interstate are all shifted.

I have forgotten exactly how I handled this (if at all) in QuickGuide, and assumed that these shows would show up correctly after DST.  From memory, though, the guide information should be presented as GMT, so MCE adjusts the GMT time to local time.  I think that's the problem now with iceTV (especially since theres a "your time zone" option in your account settings).  iceTV seems to be presenting the guide data in local time rather than GMT.

???

Hi,

It's been pointed out that when using the Guide to Search, Categories, ..., Sort by Name, the sort order is incorrect for data supplied by QuickGuide.   I've noticed the same for the iceTV feed - the sort order seems to be a strange amalgam of sort by channel, then title, but with a bunch of stuff at the top of the list in no obvious order.

Apparently (I haven't tested this), sorting the XML feed by title fixes this issue for Quickguide.

Worth trying for iceTV?

Cheers

BJ

Release Candiate 2 is now available from the releases section of the QuickGuide homepage at http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/quickguide.

This release truncates program descriptions to 507 characters where there is also a program episode title.  It appears that if there is no episode title, MCE can cope with descriptions up to 1023 chars.  However, if there is an episode title (aka sub-title), the MCE GUI (ehshell.dll) crashes when attempting to display guide information for programs if the description is more than 507 characters.

The only change between RC1 and RC2 is this change, and the only file that was changed is QuickGuide.exe, so that's all you need to replace in either an installer, or on your system.

Peter, Russell & other icetv people - feel free to grab this, include it in your files section.

Cheers

BJ

http://iceguide.icetv.com.au/cgi-bin/epg/iceguide.cgi?op=xmlguide

...is just returning the channel list only (attached).

Is it just my account?

using webget "http://iceguide.icetv.com.au/cgi-bin/epg/iceguide.cgi?op=xmlguide" -u myuserid -p mypassword -o icetvguide.xml

but I see the same thing when I enter the URL in my browser.

BJ

[climbed Ball’s Pyramid]

E.G. ABC Sydney & Melbourne (Channel 2 & 9), Australian Story for tonight (11 April) - ICETV Ep Num 35611 & 36672:
Description contains climbed Ball’s Pyramid and ends with waiting….

Other characters (eg é in café) are correctly escaped (é), but it looks like apostrophes amongst other things are being incorrectly handled.

Cheers

BJ

[Birol Ãœnel]

It looks like there's a little too much URL Encoding happening on some descriptions - at a guess only those with accented characters, such as:

 <programme start="20050205213000 +1100" stop="20050205225500 +1100" channel="1">
   <title lang="en">MOVIE: Unknown Friend</title>
   <sub-title lang="en"></sub-title>
   <desc lang="en">This tale set in Berlin tells the story of Ellen who has just been released from prison where she has spent five years for murder. Her victim was the husband of her girlfriend, Katrin, a bisexual flirt. Ellen sets out to find Katrin and to win her back.
Karoline Eichhorn, Inga Busch, Birol &amp;#195;&amp;#156;nel</desc>
   <category lang="en">Drama</category>
   <category lang="en">Movie</category>
   <episode-num system="dd_progid">11414</episode-num>
   <rating system="">
     <value>MA</value>
   </rating>
<broadcast-type>R</broadcast-type>
<broadcast-type>WS</broadcast-type>
 </programme>

Firstly, the category information in the guide seems quite good.

However, MCE guide information has a category map that is part of the guide data, that is loaded by MCE, and used to assign each programme to a category within the MCE guide.

I've attempted to allocate the categories found in the iceTV XML to the sample set of categories I've snaffled from a real MCE guide, but it is difficult, and results in anomalies.  For example, The Movie Show DVD Edition has a iceTV category of Entertainment - which happens to be one of the sub-categories of Childrens - which it obviously isn't.

While the mapping problem is one of my own making, I'm trying to second guess the iceTV's category structure - and failing.

The other problem is I'm attempting to provide for other sources of category information - which are a little different.

So, to the request - is there a definitive (even if evolving) set of categories or category hierachy behind the categories in the iceTV XMLTV guide?  If so, can this be published?

Secondly, is it possible to utilise the fact that the schema supports multiple categories to have a major and minor category included in the XMLTV data - say Movie, Adventure, for example?  This would also allow MOVIE: to be removed from the programme title.

Thanks

BJ