UK EPG data?

[scoob101]

I`m not a Sage customer yet, Im just trying to assess how much work its going to be for me to deploy it.

I can see that sage don`t provide EPG data for the UK, and there seems be a wealth of infomation on workarounds to get the UK EPG data into Sage.


Does that mean that Uk sage users have to manually upload EPG data on a periodic basis, or do these workarounds have some level of automation??

EDIT:: It seems that looking at some other threads, that you can get some UK EPG data "Over the air" via the TV card (which in my example would be a DVB-S2 card for freesat)

So I have another question:: How much Over The Air EPG data will I get for freesat? Or will i get nothing at all, and be forced to upload it in some way myself?

Would very much appreciate some advice on this - I`m close to pressing the "buy" button - but If the EPG needs constant attention to work in the UK for freesat, that would be a dealbreaker for me.

[logsvp]

AFAIK (but stand to be corrected) you can't get UK OTA EPG via SageTV.
I use a fully automated system that uses Digiguide (a subscription service but low cost), a utility described in this thread ( http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29627 ) and the donators version of XMLTV Importer for SageTV ( http://www.lmgestion.net/@en-us/4/22/54/59/article.asp )

I used to use the Radio Times as a feed but it was proving to be unreliable.

This setup works well for me and is completely automated so that I don't have to worry about it

[jaminben]

Over the air data is very hit and miss and is not all that informative.
XMLTV data is far better at providing more detail and works better for series recording.

Their are several options for XMLTV, radiotimes and digiguide are the favorites and I personally use didgiguide although you will need a sub for their service (£10 a year I think).

I proberly only interact with the importer or change settings once or twice every 3 months or when new channels get added like 4music or something from freesat. Once you have set it up a couple of times you can whizz through it and have a complete guide done within 1.5 hours.

Yes its a hassle to setup and maintain but to me its worth it.

[simonk1969]

I've been using SageTV now for about 9 months with 4 Freeview Tuner cards and use the over the air EPG data and have never had any problems.

Maybe I'm the lucky one !

[taylormadearmy]

I use DVB-T and the over the air EPG is actually pretty good these days.

[rickgillyon]

Do you get episode data and decent first-run/repeat data OTA now? I tried it to start with but the quality was rubbish.

And when logsvp says "I used to use the Radio Times as a feed but it was proving to be unreliable" I think there's only been twice over the last three years that there's been a problem, to be fair. It only needs a few minutes to add channels to the system, and I'm sure most of us have the day-to-day running automated. I believe the data is better with Digiguide, but I've never got around to looking at it yet...

[jaminben]

I could proberly live with over the air data for DVB-T but for DVB-S its a no go unless things have changed since I last tried. Getting now and next data for $ky free to air channels is a real pain, but that may have changed since the launch of Freesat so I'm not sure.