One year of TV Guide is free for all EyeTV 3 users, after which the service costs $19.95 per year. North American users of the device can now use the TV Guide programming guide, which provides 14 days of data, as well as lots of information about the shows that are on. Of the new EyeTV 3.1 features, the most exciting is probably the new electronic programming guide support. Last night, the company made good on that promise and released the EyeTV 3.1 update, which includes a number of new features that should make EyeTV users quite happy.
The new version was initially only available with the EyeTV Hybrid, but Elgato said that it would make the update available to all EyeTV users later in the month.
For Canadian users, there’s really no need to use XMLTV, since the XMLTV support for North America comes from Zap2It anyway, so it’s better to just use Zap2It Web Service directly.When Elgato released a new version of the EyeTV Hybrid tuner stick at Macworld Expo, the company also released a new version of the accompanying EyeTV software. This should allow people from Europe to use it by using the XMLTV grabber that fits their need. _ _I added support for XMLTV data source, instead of Zap2It.
I can now schedule recordings using valid EPG data for my provider, and browse the currently playing shows easily, all from the full screen interface of EyeTV. I struggled for some time with timestamps conversion (TitanTV use a base-time value, and schedule’s timestamps are relative to that base-time) and program IDs (EyeTV doesn’t support alpha-numeric IDs - I had to convert Zap2It IDs into pure numbers) but I was finally able to completely simulate TitanTV data from my own server. The only thing left was converting the actual EPG data into TitanTV XML format. To make sure I didn’t try to download EPG data from Zap2It for no reason, I added a one day disk cache (PHP’s un/serialize functions) for this data.
I then fiddled with PHP’s SOAP capability, and Zap2It web service, until I was able to successfully pull the correct data from their server (compressed, to lower the amount of data transferred between both servers). A big thanks to Zap2It for that! :) They provide EPG data using a web service (SOAP), free of charge for personal use. I then added an entry to my own web server in my Mac’s /etc/hosts file, and started to create PHP scripts on my server that would answer EyeTV’s requests for EPG data.įaking the provider list and the channels lineup was easy enough a simple XML format was used.įor the EPG data, I first had to find valid canadian EPG data.
I was able to intercept the provider lookup from a zip code, the channels lineup lookup using the chosen provider, and finally the EPG data download using the chosen lineup. Taking the matter into my own hands, I created a TitanTV (US-only EPG) account, configured EyeTV to download TitanTV data, and sniffed the HTTP packets exchanged between my computer and TitanTV’s server. This was a fact of life I lived with ever since I bought the EvolutionTV hardware, until I gave up waiting for Elgato to release an EPG for Canada.
The only problem I had left with the EyeTV software was the EPG (Electronic Program Guide) there is no EPG support for canadian users! This made using the EyeTV for more than just recording an actual option. The actual full screen interface for EyeTV is actually quite the same as the Front Row interface, and one can launch Front Row from a menu item in there. Recently, EyeTV added a full screen interface which integrates beautifully with Front Row. Since I bought it, I switched from the packaged EvolutionTV software to the more mature EyeTV software package (non free). _ I own a Mac-based DVR for quite some time now a Miglia EvolutionTV. The first year is free for all users, but starting in 2010, we’ll need to pay 20$ US a year to continue receiving the EPG._ Elgato now offers Canadian EPG in EyeTV 3.1 (they’re now using TV Guide as their source for both US and Canada).