Thread: pc entertainment system tv guide?

Hi,

Some years ago my ex put in a pc for watching satellite tv.
He is no longer around and left the pc behind for me.

I have managed to fumble it back into operation after many, many months of hair pulling and swearing.

I am still learning. I've learned a lot, I've come a long way but I still have much to learn and a long way yet to go.

Various people have offered various suggestions over the past months as to what to use for the program to watch tv with. I have tried most if not all of them.

At the moment I am trying one called mytheater. It seems to be ok for the most part, I can't find any reason not to use it other than it costs money to use it.

Anyway, so my pc has a tv tuner card and a satellite tuner card too.
I can watch local tv channels and satellite channels on the computer and it also sends the picture to all the tv's in the house. This is super nice for me because I like to have it on in the kitchen when I'm in there and I watch tv at night in my bedroom. I sleep with it on as a matter of fact.

I also like that I can set the pc to change channels on a schedule daily, like tune to RTV at 4pm for Adam-12 and Dragnet. Or every thursday night at 7pm it records Vampire Diaries all by itself. Someone told me it's like having a super Tivo. (I've never seen one so I'll take their word for it.)

One of the things that seriously annoys me is that it will NOT tell me anything about what tv show is playing on most channels, For instance on ION I can press info and it will tell me the name of the show, year, starring, plot, etc.. It will also tell me what shows are coming up soon and I can press the record button to make it schedule itself to record that show later. That is very nice to be able to do.

But I can not do that with RTV, White Springs, History, Bio, etc.. I can't do that on the local tv channels either. To record anything I have to manually create an entry for the recording from the pc keyboard or my iphone and that is a pain in the rear end.

About a week ago I got a used but very nice HDTV. It's a Vizio 32 and it's really nice. Now when I hook it to the tv antenna (same one the pc is hooked to) the tv will show me a tv guide when I press the guide button on it's remote.
And this has nothing to do with the pc at all, it's the tv doing it all by itself.
It shows me the name of the show, starring, year, plot, etc. And it will show me what all is coming on for a few days into the future too.

That's all fine and dandy but you can't program the tv to do anything. It won't pause the picture, won't record anything, can't rewind it, nothing.
It just plays tv and if you walk away you miss things. I like the pc because I can rewind live tv and pause it and all that. It's very useful.

But the pc would be way more useful if it would show a tv guide like the new tv set does.

There is a guide button for the pc and I can press it but it only shows me info for channels like NASA and ION. All the other channels, even the local air channels are blank. No info on them.

Certainly there must be a way?

According to the pc these are the cards that are in it,
Hauppauge WinTV 88x DVB-S BDA Tuner/Demod
Hauppauge WinTV 885 ATSC BDA Tuner/Demod


I love the capabilities of the pc but I am very annoyed that the tv guide on it will not work. Or should I say, it sort of works, I guess only on the channels from the Dish Network 119 satellite.

Oh, and I finally found a thing to connect a proper tv antenna. For the local channels I just have a little loop of wire on the roof I made, it works but not so good. I want to put up a large, proper antenna that my dad gave me but the thing to connect it to the cable was missing.

I looked on Radio Shack and found one but it was like $29 so I RAN as fast as I could from there. I found the same thing on Amazon.com for 98 cents!
I ordered one of those and a 2gh splittler so I can split the wire between the pc and my new HDTV, that way I can watch tv even if the pc quits working.
Both parts including shipping were only $11. Radio Shack would have ripped me off for at least $50 for the two items. To heck with them!

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how to make the pc show me a tv guide like the HDTV will do. Or is there a way to download the tv guide from the HDTV into the pc so they both have it?

I can look stuff up on titan but that's a pain and it won't show me a hybrid guide of the misc FTA and OTA channels I get.


Thanks!

Yes it can be done but it is not easy.

You have to get the TV guide data downloaded from the web in the form of an xmltv file and then use another program to display the data and interface with Mytheatre to schedule the recordings.

I use
mc2xml

to download the guide data, its hard to set up because the is no one source for data for true FTA satellites (some channels are not available) so you have to research where the line up data is available and set up multiple line ups.

Once you get this data for your station line up you can use
aTV


to display and schedule your programs for recording in Mytheatre.

Hasse the author of this program is kindly helping me with a minor issue with this program on another post here

Its a great program and once you have the whole thing set up very reliable, I currently get nearly 2 weeks TV guide data and spend about 10 minutes setting up a recording schedule after that forget it, the programs you selected just appear in your video recordings file.

About the only other thing to do is strip the ads from the programs with them using VedeoRedeo or similar if you wish.