Sage TV and the Aussie Experience

[ozgreg]

G'Day All,

Just wondering if we have anyone who has managed to get Sage TV working in Australia. I believe it should work (Although we use a different PAL) but I do not believe I have a hope of getting any meaniful program guides..

Basically I would love to hear peoples experience in trying to set up Sage TV in Aussieland and what hardware / software you did use.

[justme]

I can't say about SageTV. But I'm fairly sure there is an Australian version of the Hauppauge PVR250. I say this because of a user on SHS's PVR forum mentioned how expensive the Australian version of the PVR250 was compared to other countries. I don't think he ever found a version for another country that would work in australia. So I guess he bought the Australian version of the PVR250.

As for listings, if you can get XMLTV to work for your area you may be able to use the third party plugin mentioned in this thread. I made the link go to page 2 since that's where the info on XMLTV setup starts. Don't worry about the "bug" posts all are now taken care of as of last count.

So if you can get XMLTV data for your area and you can get an Australian PVR250 you should be OK. As a happy SageTV user I hope you can get it worked out. Best of luck.

[ozgreg]

Originally posted by justme
As for listings, if you can get XMLTV to work for your area you may be able to use the third party plugin mentioned in this thread. I made the link go to page 2 since that's where the info on XMLTV setup starts. Don't worry about the "bug" posts all are now taken care of as of last count.

So if you can get XMLTV data for your area and you can get an Australian PVR250 you should be OK. As a happy SageTV user I hope you can get it worked out. Best of luck.

Thankyou for the information, I can get a 250 and 350 at rip off prices *sighs* but the issue is the online guide which is really why I posted this thread because right now I cannot see how I can get a online TV guide... and hoping someone has found a way to do this for Australian TV..

[justme]

My sympathies on the high PVR price and the lack of XMLTV support for Australia.

I did a quick search and it seems like several people have built xmltv grabbers for Australia. Only to have them dismantled at the request of the site the data was being scraped from. It doesn't even look like a new Australian grabber is in the pipe at the XMLTV devlopers section. Huge disgrace that such a large country lacks a grabber. I sent an email to the XMLTV devlopers reguesting an Australian grabber to added. I sugggest you do the same. It's already on the request list but, more voices may get action. It looks like there is an easy source available here, but no one is assigned to building a grabber for it. The second link even has some sample code. It looks like it would be fairly simple to parse. I can't program but if you can or know someone who can....

Best of luck for a better future.

[ozgreg]

The Australian Marketplace is a strange one.. With 21 Million People spread over a country as big as the US, You would think the internet would be the next biggest thing to deliver content but it is not..

Although I can read code the scope of this project is beyond my limited skills... but thanks for the site (yes I am aware of it and actually been utilising that site for a number of years..)

Looks like I have to do some more research

[ozgreg]

Ok, I have found a few ways to do this..

Firstly I can get my hands on a VB script that will parse a TV site for TV shows not sure if I can then push that back into Sage or not yet..

I will update if I can do this...

[justme]

Did you find the link on the SageTv developers site to the format SageTV expects the epgdata file in? This is the format that was used by a user to develope the XMLTV plugin. Or are you going to parse the site and then try and convert to the DTD format used by XMLTV?

Either way best of luck.

[ozgreg]

I really wanted the XML feed the site is getting but my emails to the site have just been ignored!!! Second option now is to see how I can convert the VBS script which parses the site for me to produce a text DTD format. I almost had to can the entire project as when I installed the PVR350 it was eating too many CPU cycles on my PIII until someone pointed out that TV shown on the VGA monitor is a SOFTWARE based encode/decode (Nice trap for young players)

[dkardatzke]

The TV shown via a PVR-350 (and PVR-250) is always encoded using the hardware, never the software. This is the same whether you are using SageTV or the WinTV 2000 application.

To achieve hardware decoding, you need to use the TV-out of the PVR-350 card otherwise you will be using software decoding just like the PVR-250 card.