Hey BJReplay i think there may be a problem with your latest Beta version. If I run v5 of quickguide my mce will crash when using the epg. Specifically, if I try and do a title search an error will appear and MCE will close, this also happens with browsing the guide occasionally... If I go back to the previous version of Quickguide, using the same xml data file, everything is rock solid.
I've attached my xml file if you wanna take a look.

Also, as a matter of interest, how are you going to implement movie detection?

Oh and one more thing, your post earlier about the xml file format with actors/all the extended attributes didn't seem to work... can you please repost this?

Can't wait to see the latest version with ratings and everything

3 Questions:

• This tool looks like it does everything a MCE machine could want in the EPG space.  One question for all the Aussies out there.  To take full advantage of QuickGuide and MCE, what is the best tool for getting the guide data?  TVHarvest, TVxb, D1XMLTVGrabber etc.
• Also has anyone noticed when using EPG tools that if you setup a recording for in the future you get the little red dot.  But then if you do a update, the dots for all existing setup recordings disappear (though they still record), and it still shows up in the Scheduled list.  Is there a way to fix this so they still have the dot? - maybe QuickGuide does this and I have not tried it yet.
• In general do people update the complete XMLTV data or do they only do a refresh of the needed days.  If this makes sense.  I guess getting all the data allows for changes, but of course takes longer, and may even make the little red dot issue above worse?

 

Thanks for your help.

I recently changed the source for my XMLTV file (more complete channel information with this one) and since then Quickguide throws up an error message when I run it.

Attached are my files, can you point me to where the error might be? Thanks.

Edit: For some reason, I get an error message when I try to attach a ZIP file. I've renamed the file to txt. If you could rename it back to ZIP and open it, you'll find the 2 config files and 1 XML file.

Their was an microsoft update a week or so ago that fixed this problem.

 

Jeff

Hi All,

I'm not ignoring you, just been busy.

Hopefully a new release tonight (if I can get started - my 10 year old office chair broke tonight, so I've been doing that wierd thing - shopping for office furniture at 8:30 at night).  This release will still be a beta, but aside from minor bugs in it, is pretty close to how I want to get this program (at least for my purposes), so I'm aiming for RC1 by the end of this week.

BJ

Article describing the update: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=888316

Update download page: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6563dea6-fac0-4604-9418-f20640cc7a20&displaylang=en

I'll also add that the error message that quickguide throws out is "Specified cast is not Valid".

 

Appreciate your help.

Worked perfect thank you.   That will make the wife happy.

BJ,

I haven't got the chance to test your application yet, since I'm updating my grabbers because they didn't provide a stop time for the program attribute in the xml file and you state Quickguide doesn't support that.

With your app we'll be able to get a very complete EPG system for unsupported countries and for that we are truly thankfull (at least I am).

Since I'm messing with the grabbers....let me just ask a  few questions:

You mention support for categories, subtitle, credits and future support for ratings. Are these MPAA ratings or star ratings? (or both? :w00t

Here is an example of my grabber output for a specified film:

    <programme start="20050217150500 GMT" channel="L Premium">
        <title>Anything Else - A Vida e Tudo o Mais</title>
        <category>Film</category>
        <category>Comedy</category>
        <sub-title>Anything Else</sub-title>
        <desc>Um jovem, que deseja tornar-se escritor em Nova Iorque,  apaixona-se à primeira vista por uma rapariga rebelde que lhe vai ensinar novas formas de encarar a vida.</desc>
        <credits>
           <director>Woody Allen</director>
           <actor>Woody Allen</actor>
           <actor>Christina Ricci</actor>
           <actor>Jason Biggs</actor>
           <actor>Stockard Channing</actor>
           <actor>Danny DeVito</actor>
        </credits>
        <country>USA</country>
        <date>2003</date>
        <rating system="MPAA">
           <value>PG-13</value>
        </rating>
        <star-rating>
           <value>3/3</value>
        </star-rating>
    </programme>

 

1. Does Quickguide support Year, Country?

2. If it will support star rating how big is the scale?  (x/x)

3. Does MCE support pictures (icons, covers or screenshots) for programme details?

 

Just a small annoying problem - and it could be bug / feature / or just damn user ignorance.

It is happening in beta 4 and beta 5 - I am using tvharvest to obtain xml data, an extract follows;

XML extracted and processed look like this;

 

    <programme start="20050216150000 +1100" stop="20050216160000 +1100" channel="Channel Seven Melbourne">
      <title>She Spies</title>
      <desc>Our heroines race to stop a mysterious assassin.</desc>
      <category>Action</category>
      <sub-title>You don't Know Jack</sub-title>
      <rating system="ABA">
        <value>PG</value>
      </rating>
    </programme>

    <programme start="20050217150000 +1100" stop="20050217160000 +1100" channel="Channel Seven Melbourne">
      <title>She Spies</title>
      <desc>When Jack discovers a computer technology company is selling illegal defence industry software, he sends the girls to investigate.</desc>
      <category>Action</category>
      <sub-title>First Date</sub-title>
      <rating system="ABA">
        <value>PG</value>
      </rating>
    </programme>

    <programme start="20050218150000 +1100" stop="20050218160000 +1100" channel="Channel Seven Melbourne">
      <title>She Spies</title>
      <desc>Corporate executives across the nation are being told to resign or die as a mad secretary marshals all the female secretaries to rise up and dethrone their male bosses.</desc>
      <category>Action</category>
      <sub-title>While You Were Out</sub-title>
      <rating system="ABA">
        <value>PG</value>
      </rating>
    </programme>

    <programme start="20050221150000 +1100" stop="20050221160000 +1100" channel="Channel Seven Melbourne">
      <title>She Spies</title>
      <desc>While the She Spies hunt for an elusive assassin, Jack is kidnapped and held in a hospital by an evil doctor who tries to convince him hes been in coma for six months.</desc>
      <category>Action</category>
      <sub-title>Daze of Future Past</sub-title>
      <rating system="ABA">
        <value>PG</value>
      </rating>
    </programme>

    </programme>
    <programme start="20050222150000 +1100" stop="20050222160000 +1100" channel="Channel Seven Melbourne">
      <title>She Spies</title>
      <desc>An elusive international jewel thief kidnaps Cassie and threatens to kill her unless the She Spies stand back while he robs a jewel collection from a local museum.</desc>
      <category>Action</category>
      <sub-title>The Replacement</sub-title>
      <rating system="ABA">
        <value>PG</value>
      </rating>
    </programme>

All the above are just differing epsiodes of a particular program, all on the same channel, one per day in the week extracted, all appear to be identical except for <desc>. Most importantly they all have the same Category of Action.

Loaded into MCE - they appear in the correct Genre, but they are not grouped together as one item. The first two are grouped together, then another entry is shown, which if you click on more - shows the remaining items.

How come they are not all grouped together? Is this an error I have in the setup? Cant see how - as they all have the same category... I'm at a lost with this one, and it occurs to many programs. Clues please? Can supply config files if neccessary.

 

Thanks

---

Impact

Hi Mike,

First, stop time - I've coded around that already.

I got MPAA ratings working last night, but haven't had a look at the star ratings - I haven't yet seen an XMLTV file with them.  MCE supports a 4 start rating with a half star resolution.  If you specify them as 0S, 0HS, 1S, 1HS through 4S (0 to 4 stars with half stars inbetween), then the code I wrote last night for MPAA ratings will work nicely.

I've addressed the fact that (as far as I can tell) MCE only supports MPAA and US TV ratings by supporting a Mapping between the ratings found in the XMLTV feed and MPAA.  I can support the same for stars.  In the case of your example, I guess I'd map 3/3 to either 3 (3S) stars (and that's the highest that would be seen in MCE anyway), or perhaps allow the user to map that to 4 stars.

MCE doesnt support country, but does support a language element at the program level (though strictly speaking it should apply to audio or subtitles) - I could map a country to the MCE language.

MCE does support year, so I could map the programme date element to the MCE year.

I don't believe MCE supports pictures, but I'd be happy for someone to prove me wrong (and tell me how).  I ignore icon elements at the moment.

Feel free to PM me output from your grabber.

BJ

Zip and post the XMLTV & Config files on this one so I can reproduce this, but I think this might just be how MCE chooses to display this.

BJ

Wow BJReplay......you're the man!

Not having to provide stop times saves me a lot of time messing around the code since I use 3 different grabbers.

Now....on your info:

The star rating system I've embbebed in the xml was done taking in consideration the XMLTV DTD. XMLTV provides 3 levels of ratings but as MCE supports 9 (0,0.5,1,......,4) I can just addapt the XML output to whatever is necessary like 0S,0HS,....  but my suggestion (and to keep the XMLTV file valid ) is to map it as 0/9,1/9,2/9.........9/9. But that is only my oppinion: all I want is getting it to work - you decide on the format!! 

If you could map the year I would be most gratefull.

Also don't mind Country to be mapped for language, too 

Having all that.......pictures are about the only thing we can't get MCE to grab. I also don't know if MCE supports pictures or icons but what got me thinking was a post in this forum to enable the 'Movies' feature on non US countries. Haven't tried it yet as I currently have my MCE machine on full development state, but it seems it is possible to get a list (with images) of what movies are on now, on the next 2 hours and search against your EPG. Although I guess this info is downloaded on request, I read somewhere that that's only because EPG sources don't distribute it with the feed  

Perhaps someone can explain or has some knowledge on this.......

BJ......I'll PM tomorrow my grabber to you so you can play with it. The image/icon is about the only attribute the XML output lacks. Not because I can't fetch it.......but because I'm unsure MCE uses it.

Thanks again for your excelent work.

Mike

Mike, re stars - I think you should go with XMLTV DTD compliant stars, and I'll map them to MCE expectations.  That way your XMLTV will be more compatible, and QuickGuide will be compatible with more sources of XMLTV data - which is the aim at this stage.

re movies - I've got movie detection working in code - I'm just not (yet) using it to tell MCE the program is a movie using the specific ProgramAttribute.

No new releases tonight - out drinking.

BJ

BJ - Enjoy your drinking tonight !

When you sober up (hehehe!) here is the zip file that contains the xml created - listing2.xml, and the various config files used - in the hope you can duplicate the problem of duplicate shows showing up in the search by genre... I think I included everything you need.

I'll admit to needing to do some more work on the categories stuff - but thought I'd see if this problem could be solved...

All the best, have a good drink - you deserve it!!

---

Impact