Is there a way to get custom program listings?

[egaertner]

I've been using SageTV for about a year now, and anywhere I have been has simply had a comcast cable connection. I would enter the zip code within SageTV, follow the steps, and then everything worked as normal....

My university (Northeastern) just set up a custom contract with Comcast for cable television service throughout the campus. It's a custom channel lineup just for the school, and it's not publicly accessible to Tivo or any other online guide sites yet.

Is there any way to setup a custom channel lineup with SageTV, so I can get program listings like normal while at school? I haven't ventured past the standard installation of SageTV, so I'm not sure whats available for these sorts of issues.

If there's any way to solve my problem, a well explained description of what needs to be done would be very appreciated from the SageTV community!

Thanks,
Eric

[stanger89]

That was what I was going to suggest


Eric,

If that doesn't work (and I'd be surprised if it doesn't) there's always XMLTV.

[egaertner]

How exactly does that work, and are there any downsides to it? I like the first poster's idea, but I'm sure there will be some channels still that I wont be able to have come up from the local cable listings (Custom HBO channels we're getting on analog cable and such)

Originally Posted by stanger89

That was what I was going to suggest


Eric,

If that doesn't work (and I'd be surprised if it doesn't) there's always XMLTV.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by egaertner

How exactly does that work, and are there any downsides to it? I like the first poster's idea, but I'm sure there will be some channels still that I wont be able to have come up from the local cable listings (Custom HBO channels we're getting on analog cable and such)

Well, the first thing I'll point out is that, as long as the channels your school will be getting exist on the normal cable system, you'll be able to remap them to work on the analog version your school has. Sage doesn't care whether they're supposed to be analog or digital, it just needs to know what device to tune for them, and what channel to tune to.

As for XMLTV, the downside would be it would probably be a pain if you had to go that route. Any negative to going that route would be limited to the effort involved in accumulating the data and populating a correctly formatted XML file.

As for how it works, it's been a while so I'm not up on the details. But basically you tell Sage to use a XMLTV for the guide data (instead of some cable provider) and then, via a plugin, Sage reads the data from an XML file on your PC instead of from the SageTV servers on the internet.

Assuming you have a complete, properly formatted XML file, there's really no difference between using that and Sage's native guide.

[egaertner]

That is awesome to hear how easy it should be to get my listings fixed! I'm not going to by physically switching over till September, but I'll definitly come back here if I can't figure it out. I'm sure theres tuts and such on XMLTV if I need to go that route. Thanks again guys