Wonky Gibbon Ramblings

As of sometime late 2017, the EPG in the UK no longer seems to update in MCE. In all honesty, the need for MCE and indeed PVRs in general is on the wane given the existence of on-demand services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and catchup services like BBC iPlayer – not to mention Smart TVs and so on. Nevertheless – I’m not quite ready to kiss MCE goodbye – so I needed to keep it going just a little longer. Until I no longer need to play a Blueray – that sort of thing.

Googling – the solution seems to be to use a tool called EPG Collector. At the time of writing this can be downloaded from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/epgcollector/files/V4.3/

Installation and Config for Windows 7 MCE as follows:

1. Download the EPG Collector xxx msi file – and install it.
2. Download the latest EPG Fixpak from the same page, unzip it, and copy the files over the top of those installed by the msi.
3. Run EPG Centre
4. Go to File -> Create Collection parameters… select UK-SkyTV (Freesat does not seem to work).
   This will now open the configuration window.
   The first tab (Tuning) should have all the parameters set. No need to change anything here but check your country and area are set correctly
   Output tab. Select “EPG Collector imports the data to Window Media Centre”
   Tick the boxes for the two ‘create episode tags …’ options
   Advanced tab. Tick the Use freesat Huffman tables…
5. Channels tab. Click on start scan. Loads of channels should appear. Lots of junk and duplicated. Click on ‘exclude all’ and then untick the excluded box for the channels actually desired (and that successfully tune). You can click on the column headers to sort the data. In the current version I couldn’t see any tickboxes for exclude, but by moving the cell cursor into the right excluded cell using the arrow keys and then pressing the space bar I was able to change the setting. Excluded rows are shown in red.
6. Click on File->Save as, to save your setup to disk – save it with the default name EPG Collector.ini.
7. Click on Run->Collect EPG Data

If you now open Windows Media Centre, you should find a guide full of data. Yay!

If all is well, it’s worth setting up the Windows Scheduler to automatically run EPG Collector for you every day or so. I f you used the default location for the EPG Collector.ini file then you don’t need any arguments either.

To do this:

1. Open Windows Control Panel and navigate to Administrative Tools.
2. Open Task Scheduler
3. On the right hand side of the Task Scheduler window are a set of typical actions. Select “Create Basic Task”
4. Work your way through the wizard that pops up
   1. Set the task to run when the computer starts
   2. Select the program to run as C:\Program Files (x86)\Geekzone\EPG Collector\EPGCollector.exe
      1. If you used the default config ini file name, you don’t need to provide any parameters.

And your done.

Particular thanks to this guy:

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=77177.0