European users????

[LostInSpace]

Are there some European users of SageTV on this forum?
It should be interresting to put European specific requests in this thread (e.g. EPG adapted to European TV guides...)

EPG is e great feature we can't use in many European countries.
Let's hope we'll be heard

[bisbjerg]

Hi LostInSpace

Just to let you know, that you're not the only European SageTV user here.
I agree, that it would be very interesting to get EPG for my own country, i.e. Denmark. XMLTV doesn't quite do the job. Looking foreward to SageTV V2.

Regards,
Lasse

[nielm]

Hi lostinspace,

In another thread you were asking about Sage supporting European TV guides... The problem is that there are not many TV guide providers that sell/give the information to the public in a 'sensible' binary format (and those that do, eg ananova.com which is used by XMLTV's tv_grab_uk, tend to be only for specific markets), so XMLTV has to resort to grabbing human-readable web-pages and converting it...

The problem is that these web-pages tend to be paid for either by advertising, or by subscriptions to the print version, and the owners don't like the idea of people grabbing the data for free for their own private use... (The provider for Sweden's tv_grab_sn has just started blocking XMLTV for this reason
xmltv link )

The other problem is that in Europe ( apart from the UK - where the Sky+ satellite PVR has a closed monopoly) there are hardly any consumer oriented PVR systems to stimulate the EPG provider market... (Thompson has its DTH7000 (PDF), but I think it gets it's EPG from Teletext)

The availability of European EPG data in SageTV V2 is unlikely to be any different from SageTV V1 in this respect -- They have only just got nationwide US coverage... I guess Canada will be next... You will just have to put up with XMLTV!

You mentioned EuroTV.com -- 5 or 6 years ago, there used to be a nice little progam that grabbed the listings from this web site and would highlight your favourite programs based on keywords... EuroTV got very upset by this, and started blocking the program. EuroTV now say on their web-site:

Information contained on this server is copyrighted and may not be distributed, modified, reused, re-posted, or otherwise used outside the scope of a WWW client without the express written permission of B. On The Net, owner of the EuroTV site.

For the sake of the Data Providers protection against unauthorized copy, some information, selected at random, is intentionally not correct. Actions taken consist mainly in altering some timing, resume, actors, ... for each TV channels. Other actions are implemented to demonstrate, if necessary, that data were copied from this server without permission.

...not very useful for an EPG for a PVR, However, they may be willing to sell their guide database to you...

The tv_grab_be.pl that I am using gets it's data from telemoustique/teveblad... There is no similar copyright on their web-page yet, but I am concerned that if they look at their server logs and see a single IP address downloading all data for all channels for the next 6 days, they might start to block it... You are after all getting their TV guide for free without buying their magazine, or viewing the adverts in it!

There is no such thing as a free lunch!