Snapper

I live in Victoria outside of Melbourne. We receive Ten Victoria (Southern Cross
Network Ten), WIN Television, Prime, SBS, SBS 2, ABC1 and ABC2.

Now, lately, despite the committment from the networks to bring us full and up
to date EPGs I've been finding irregularities across the networks. The worst has
probably been Prime. ABC and ABC2 haven't been that flash either, while SBS is
sporadic.

It seems that WIn and TenVic are the better performers in this area.

Often, the guide will be blank or it won't have any info for "now and "next"
shows. Sometimes if this occurs if I press the info button to bring up the list
it may or may not display a full listing.

What are your experiences, folks? And I wonder how Prime especially, will go
selling the Tivo to rural Victorians based on its you beaut EPG when it fails to
display correctly.

Paul Dwerryhouse

Snapper <snapper1@y7mail.com.invalid> writes:

>What are your experiences, folks? And I wonder how Prime especially, will go
>selling the Tivo to rural Victorians based on its you beaut EPG when it fails
>to display correctly.

The Tivo has an ethernet port, so presumably it can just pull down better
guides off the net (that's also what I do with my MythTV box; you get much
better programming information than provided by the off-air EPGs).

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Paul Dwerryhouse | PGP Key ID: 0x6B91B584

Snapper

Paul Dwerryhouse wrote...

> The Tivo has an ethernet port, so presumably it can just pull down better
> guides off the net (that's also what I do with my MythTV box; you get much
> better programming information than provided by the off-air EPGs).

What extra info?

As for the Tivo, how does its programmer work? Does it base its programming (to
record shows) on the EPG and if so how editable is it?

Last night I set the Mystar PVR that Austar pay television provides to record "2
and a half men" on WIN. I used the EPG to record.

Now, the rubbish that was on before it went over time. So I got the last few
minutes of that pap, then the 1st 20 something minutes of 2.5 blokes. I had also
used the EPG to record the second ep of 2.5B. So what happens is that the end of
the first ep was cut short but it was on the start of the second recording. But
that finished at 9.35, but the show itself finished 5 mins. later.

The PVR has settings that allow you to configure it to start recording a minute
or two or whatever before the programmed start and a few mins. after the program
end. Unfortunately the settings, while good for pay television recording which
is mostly on time, is useless for FTA particularly during prime time when you're
most likely to want to record stuff.

I have an FTA digital PVR but it's a single tuner (well, 1.5 actually), and at
the time I had it recording another show so I was forced to use the pay TV PVR
which also has FTA tuners in it.

Paul Dwerryhouse

Snapper <snapper1@y7mail.com.invalid> writes:

>What extra info?

Well, if I take the film being shown on SBS on Thursday night as an example,
it provides a paragraph summary of the film, lists what awards it won, the
lead actors, the director, date of release and the genre.

It also has all program guides for the entire coming week for all FTA channels;
I know that some stations seem to be advertising this for their EPGs, but it
never seems to work for me.

(And since it's a Mythtv box, I can access this all via a web-browser on my
computer, so I don't have to use a clunky remote control in front of the TV).

>Now, the rubbish that was on before it went over time.

Yeah, running overtime is a big problem with the commercial stations. The ABC
is pretty good, and SBS is reasonable (although nowhere near as good as they
were prior to embedding ads in the middle of programs). Generally I just set
everything to record about 10 minutes longer than it runs - and on the very,
very rare occasion that I record a commercial channel, I let it run 30 mins
longer.

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Paul Dwerryhouse | PGP Key ID: 0x6B91B584