Niall has details of Big Screen EPG (an EPG tool for Windows 7 Media Center), for regions without official EPG data this would be a very valuable tool. Here are some of the features (taken from Niall’s blog)

  • Brand new User Interface – much easier on the eye /and faster to user (with a new Control Panel style UI).
  • New ‘Add New Provider’ wizard makes it much quicker to add new sources – and find the correct settings for them (with inbuilt feed analysis logic).
  • Enhanced Support for IceTV Users (makes use of the IceTV series/program Id’s now being supplied with their feeds) – plus easy IceTV setup wizard (where you now just enter your username/password – and it works out most of the rest).
  • Customizable Series + Program Identification Logic – which allows you to accurately track unique Series/Programs (repeated on other channels/timeslots) so the advanced Media Center recording features work 100% (such as ‘Any Channel’ recordings).
  • Auto Series Metadata Injection – from a large db of thousands of well known TV Series – Program Images (displayed in 7MC), Star Ratings, Genres and more are automatically injected into your guide (when matching series are detected in your xmltv source).
  • Support for mapping Classifications/Ratings to ‘TV Ratings’ – rather than just ‘MPAA Ratings’ (which then enables usage with Media Center inbuilt Parental Controls – nb: Parental Controls are not fully implemented in Windows 7 Beta 7000)
  • Logo Presets directory (just drop your channel logo’s in the ..\ProgramData\Big Screen\EPG\Logos path – and they will come up as quick presets when editing channels.
  • + quite a few bug fixes and enhancements to the existing code.

One feature I really like is the online TV ratings which gathers data from Big Screen EPG, this kind of user generated data could open up lots of possibilities for things like recommendations services. Checkout Niall’s blog for all details

ratingsau

3 thoughts on “Big Screen EPG v0.3 (Pimp’n Edition)”
  1. I wasn’t too excited about this to begin with as the default epg works well enough for me but adding all that extra metadata like ratings and better synopsys info seems really worth it.

  2. cw-kid : I’m not 100% sure how things are setup in Thailand. I’m sure BS EPG will import the data – but the actual channel-listing mapping process generally differes from country to country. (I can confirm however people are succesfully using the trial in UK with freeview, NZ with STB/sat, Hong Kong).
    If you want to join the private beta – please see my blog post (down the bottom is a link to where/how you sign up via http://www.xpmediacenter.com.au ). Currently I’m trying to update the docs for the new version – so am temporarily holding off new testers to avoid confusion (but will then send invites to everyone that is waiting/applied – hopfully over the weekend). Otherwise – public beta (for upcoming v0.4 release) will be over next couple of weeks.

    Niall

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