Windows Media Center TV Guide Data Fix [WMC OTA EPG]

For those of you who are still using Windows Media Center having no TV Guide might be a familiar site. Microsoft's guide data has become increasingly unreliable over the last couple of years, to the point where we're now going several months without any TV Guide data at all here in the UK.

I'm not sure how this compares to other regions, however from what I can find online people around the world seem to have incomplete guide data, to no guide data at all.

I do feel this is ashame, despite Microsoft not developing Media Center since the Windows 7 days I still find it to be the most user friendly PVR out there.

This was the guide on our Family Media Center for the last couple of weeks:



However if you follow this tutorial then you should end up with guide data sourced over the air in media center:



What I have done is source the data over the air using EPG Collector.

EPG Collector is a Windows application for collecting the EPG data from DVB or ATSC streams in EIT, MHEG5, OpenTV, MediaHighway, FreeSat and PSIP formats, then creating an XMLTV file. It can also import the data to 7MC, DVBViewer or Windows Media Center.

To get started download and install EPG Collector, at the time of writing 4.3 is the latest version. I'd recommend you download the Windows Installer version as I had issues with the standalone package.

Once installed, load up EPG Centre and select File > Create Collection Parameters:



Here I selected "Custom Parameters" as none of the options below applied to UK Freeview, however depending on where you are in the world and your setup, you might well have a good starting point:



Now select your country and the area, the area is where your local TV Transmitter is located. If you don't know this you will have to do some research on Google and find out. The correct Frequency and Collection type should be determined automatically.

You can then specify which TV tuner you wish to use for guide data scanning, i simply allow any available tuner to be used:



Now click update and you should be presented with the following, choose your country. I also had to choose "Use FreeSat Huffman tables to translate compressed text":



Press ok and move on to the Output tab:



Here i selected:

• EPG Collector imports the data in to Windows Media Center
• Dont log gaps between programmes
• Automatically map EPG data to channels
• Use programme title to generate links (for series and repeats)

On the channels tab you can exclude certain channels from obtaining guide data, I only obtain guide data for channels we actually use:



On the advanced tab I changed "data collection" to 600 seconds, from 300. I found 300 did not give enough time to gather all the guide data, so I would have some listings for a channel, then no data for the next few hours.

Changing to 600 seconds gave enough time for all the data for my selected channels to be gathered:



Now go File > Save as and save your settings, remember where you save them:





We can automate the guide data collection process, however lets test your settings actually work first.

Select Run > Collect EPG Data



Select "Yes"



You should then see a free tuner is found is guide data collection is started, this should take about 10 minutes:



Hopefully everything should go ok:



You can now load Windows Media Center up and hopefully see your guide populated with data:



You might however need to map some of your collected data to channels manually,

How To Map Guide Data To Channels on Windows Media Center:

To map guide data to channel on Windows Media Center, first go to Settings:



TV:



Guide:



Edit Channels:



Click on the channel you wish to edit the data for:



Edit the listings:



Then choose the listings you wish to assign to that channel:



Once done be sure to save your settings before you edit out the settings for that particular channel.

All been well you should have fixed all your Windows Media Center guide data issues now. However you can automate the gathering of data with a scheduled task, meaning you won't have to remember to load Epg Collector every couple of days to gather new guide data.

Automating Guide Data Collecting With EPG Collector:

Now you have confirmed everything is working, it's time to automate the gathering of guide data, so it happens on a daily basis without you having to remember to do it.

The easiest way to do this is to create a batch file that we will run as a scheduled task.

To do this open Notepad, you will find this in your Start Menu by searching for Notepad.

In notepad type cd then the path to where EPG Collector was installed, for myself this was C:\Program Files (x86)\Geekzone\EPG Collector

For the next line we want to load EPG Collector with our .ini file containing the settings we have just created (this is why I told you to remember where you saved them earlier) In this case my settings file was called EPG Freeview Collector.ini and was saved in C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Geekzone\EPG Collector\

So the second line would look like:

EPGCollector.exe /ini="C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Geekzone\EPG Collector\EPG Freeview Collector.ini"

Giving the end result:

Code:

cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Geekzone\EPG Collector
EPGCollector.exe /ini="C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Geekzone\EPG Collector\EPG Freeview Collector.ini"

Now select File > Save As and save somewhere such as your documents folder.

Please note I have selected the file type as "All Files" and called the file GuideUpdate.bat

The .bat at the end is important as it will save your file as a batch file and not a text document.



Next we want to open the Task Scheduler and schedule a date and time for our task (the batch script we have just created) to run. To do this search for Task Scheduler in your Start Menu and load that up.

Click on the "Task Scheduler Library" and right click to "Create New Task":



Name your new task and give it a description, you then want to select "Run whether the user is logged on our not" and "run with highest privileges"



On the Triggers tab click "New"

Here you can choose how often the task is run, I would suggest daily.

Choose a start time, this is the time each day your guide data will run. Your Media Center PC will need to be turned on so I would suggest choosing a time when it will be on.

You then want to tell the ask to recur every day.

Finally I also select "Stop task if it runs longer than" and choose 1 hour, 1 hour is plenty of time to gather guide data for, however the task should end within 10 minutes if you chose the same settings as I did.



Now click the "Actions" tab, the action you wish to choose is "Start a program"

Simply browse to the location you saved your batch script and select that before clicking ok:



Enter the password of the account that will be running this scheduled task, by default this is the password of the user account you are currently logged on as:



That's it! your scheduled task will now be created and will update your guide data daily.



I hope this guide is of help to anyone else who still wants to use Windows Media Center and have reliable guide data. This currently works perfect for me in the UK after a bit of trial and error with various settings. In theory you can now use Windows Media Center indefinitely with complete guide data.

Unless the standards for broadcasting TV change Media Center should work pretty well for many years to come regardless, so I feel no need to switch until their is actually a better alternative. I have a feeling this will likely be Plex in the future, however the live TV and recording functionality is still in it's infancy.

This guide was created on Windows 7, however should also work on Windows 8.1.

 

@DHaviator You don't need to turn it off, they co-exist fine. EPG Collector imports the data in to the existing WMC guide.

To answer your private message here as it's easier to discuss in one place, yes this still works fine for me. The only thing I have noticed is that sometimes guide data will be missing randomly for a couple of hours on a certain channel, then be perfect for the next few days. This doesn't happen often but is something i've occasionally noticed.

I suspect this could be resolved by allowing for guide data to be gathered for a longer duration than 600 seconds, however 600 seconds is usually fine in my experience the minority of the time.

Over all the end result has been great, my guide data has updated OTA each day with the scheduled task for the last 3+ months now, everything has been like it was before the Microsoft guide data became so unreliable.

I can't really ask for anything more from a free solution.

 

Windows 7 extended support ends January 14, 2020 so i'd suspect guide data would be offered until then, however who knows given how unreliable it currently is now.

Windows 8.1 is supported until 2023 which also has an edition with Media Center, so it might well be until then.

Either way it's possible to obtain your own guide data with some effort for the initial setup, so in theory you could use Media Center indefinitely, or at least until the broadcast standards change again. However given how long it took for analogue TV to be switch off I don't see that happening anytime soon.

By then other applications with DRV functionality might have caught up to Media Center, I do like the look of Plex although the PVR support is only in beta and by far its weakest function at the moment. Kodi is also "ok" however neither of them are anywhere near as polished Media Center, which hasn't been updated since 2009! Just goes to show how far ahead Microsoft were with it.

 

Glad you managed to resole that issue! Do let me know how you get on as it would be interesting to hear how your experience goes.

 

DHaviator said he fixed that issue:

"Just search the web and found out that the solution to this is to disable 'visual themes' on computability tab of short cut properties!"

As for the JIT error can you just continue?

 

Glad you got it working, enjoy having guide data once again!

 

I seem to get around a weeks worth of data on most channels. If you have another setup that's working which is free then it's probably little benefit you switching.

 

Not had the issue myself yet, however its great to know its been patched.

 

Have you tried manually mapping the EPG Collector data to each channel? and if so does any data show up in the guide?