OTA EPG listings in Canada?

[Opus4]

We are aware of the issues with Canadian OTA EPG setup & are looking to improve that in the future.

When configuring EPG for OTA tuners, are you selecting cable/satellite instead of broadcast for the EPG setup? I'm not sure why, but for some reason, the Canadian broadcast markets end up getting listed under the cable/sat choices. I think you should be able to select 'Antenna' or your location there and end up with a reasonable start for your local OTA channels.

Regarding directly editing the station ID for a channel instead of using the roundabout way of adding a new channel w/the desired ID... well, you simply can't edit an ID at them moment. That might be part of an update too.

- Andy

[vikingisson]

I do hope that sage finds some fixes for this but it has been a very long time with EPG issues. There's just no love for Canada especially if you don't have cable tv and go all OTA.

I thought that the choose cable/sat route to get to OTA ("antenna") was a general issue with sage and not just Canada. That's a very old problem and in fact used to work better in v6. Now I'm lucky to get "Antenna" listed as it used to. Somehow I got it going but I think I had to choose Buffalo and then add channels manually.

But here's where it makes little sense; Zap2it lists all the channels and their proper IDs and nearly all OTA channels exist on various cable lineups. It certainly appears that the info is there but sage won't pick them due to some licencing thing. For most OTA channels it does pull in I have to manually change the ID to something that will pull EPG data (cable version of the same). Fix that and maybe get OTA "antenna" choice back as it used to be even if it's a bug.

EPG is critical to having a usable system. I'm OTA only for TV and it's a major pain to get working. Once it does work I tend to leave it alone even though it randomly shows "no epg data" on random channels at times. Later on it might show.

[wayner]

This issue is one of the strange things about SageTV but I don't think it is unique to Canada.

Apparently Sage's contract with Zap2it does not cover channels that are OTA only. But 99% (or more) of the channels available in North America are on some form of cable or satellite (I believe that all Canadian OTA channels are deemed must-carry channels by the CRTC for Canadian cable companies). Surely it wouldn't be an issue to expand their contract to include OTA only channels? And they could do a better job in figuring out that OTA channel 20-1 (5-1) CBLT-DT in Toronto is available on Rogers cable as channel 514 and has channel ID 46245 rather than giving it a channel ID of 5 which means no EPG data.

[vikingisson]

Yeah we've been around this topic for a very long time. If 99% of the OTA channels are also on cable then I don't see why it should be a problem. But it is. I have to remap nearly every single channel once I find a match on a cable lineup which is a pain if you don't have cable. I have to fake a lineup just to get a list that I can use. It would be easier if I can simply type the ID instead of going through a list looking for one. And this isn't always going to work, next week it might be wonky again.

So the question is why can't we pull EPG for OTA channels which is the real issue? It has nothing to do with them being OTA *only*, they are all available somewhere but why do I have to remap them when they are right there in Zap2it? If I'm right then it isn't about OTA that aren't on cable, it is about OTA period. Sage doesn't map OTA EPG.

[wayner]

I totally agree. I guess they (Sage) want to pull all of the data from Zap2it, but how hard is it to maintain a table like this:

Physical  Name  ID
20-1    CBLT-DT 46245
40-1    CFTO-DT 44784
53-1    CITY-DT 34200

I will even volunteer to do this for the Toronto region. Get volunteers for Montreal, Vancouver, Windsor and we are pretty much done with it. (I don't know if other large cities get enough OTA stations to make it worthwhile)

[vikingisson]

Again, we've offered this before and never hear a response except for the same remapping routines suggestion from years ago. Personally I don't see why pulling EPG from zap2it as is won't work. The data is there, sage won't pull it. So it has to be a matter of sage not paying for it which I don't understand unless it happens to be stupid expensive but I'd like to hear that from sage themselves.

-->edit. zap2it might not have the physical channels but the ID is all we need right? If I look up the OTA ID as sage sees it then I see EPG at zap2it. Physical channel shouldn't matter. Compromise for me would be the ability to enter the "working" ID instead of the list that is a problem for us without cable. I can look up the ID and just need to enter it.