HTPC and PVR the home for MegaEPG

The poll results indicate that many people schedule their EPG update at night between 2am-6am. Unless you a morning TV watcher, I think a better time to schedule the EPG update is close to the evening prime-time or the time you usually watch TV (but not too close). Thus the EPG information will be more correct and up-to-date. Of course it depends on how often the provider updates its website, but if updates are frequent enough, you'll get a more accurate EPG.

Site hometheater.co.il has awarded the MegaEPG the "Best Product of 2007" title in the HTPC category. I am very touched to receive an acknowledgement from the community of the highest level professionals and good friends. I can not imagine how the areas of audio, video, television, HTPC and gadgets in general could exist in Israel without hometheater's articles, reviews and the forum. It's a honor and a pleasure to serve the community. Thank you very much, guys!

I wish we had a better local EPG support and greater TV providers' openness towards the fast growing group of HTPC users. I wish the next time we'll choose something much more exciting as the best HTPC product. There are a lot of nice and innovative products there: hardware, HTPC cases, media extenders, applications! I wish I could concentrate on something more valuable and helpful having the complete and accurate EPG information provided by our TV companies.

MegaEPG 1.2.0 has been released, see the Downloads section. It includes support for Norway and few bug fixes and improvements (the complete list is in Docs/ChangeLog.txt).

The new 1.1.2 update finally fixes the annoying Windows 64 bit issue. Users with 64 bit versions of Windows XP, MCE or Vista should download and use the release. This is the only fix in the release.

Quite an important MegaEPG update has been released (see the Downloads section). There are updates in some scripts due to output format modifications in the providers' sources. Some changes in the 1.1.1 version:

• Windows 64bit version issues are hopefully resolved.
• megaepgw (a windowed version of the MegaEPG) does not show modal error messages in the middle of processing anymore. It also accepts a new --noui command line parameter that closes the application automatically upon completion (no user interaction will be required with this parameter).
• tv2day_he and tv2dayQ_he scripts now correctly parse the modified format of categories.
• walla_he script now correctly parse the modified output format.
• dstv_za script updated to use more reliable URL for obtaining the guide for South Africa.

For a complete list of changes please refer to Docs\ChangeLog.txt.

MegaEPG 1.1.0 beta has been released (see the Downloads section). The next major version design is not progressing as rapidly as I want it to, therefore I decided to make an intermediate release. It introduces the following features:

• Support for South Africa (DSTV satellite provider)
• A windowed megaepg application - megaepgw. It is more convenient to run the windowed application than the console application when making a manual update.
• IMDB rating configuration is now a part of the epgconfig configuration wizard.

Try it and provide your feedback. This intermediate release will be supported in conjunction with the version 2 development.

Please remember that September 16 at 2:00 (tonight) the daylight saving time ends in Israel and we move to the standard time which is one hour back: the time will be 1:00. A special attention is required during time switching otherwise your EPG might be one hour shifted. MegaEPG takes the timezone and DST flag from the operating system. You have to turn the DST flag off in the system time Time Zone properties (or verify it's off and the time is correct).

If you are using Microsoft Vista, you should download a patch that corrects fixed dates for Jerusalem timezone. I'd also recommend all Windows users to switch the internet time synchronization off for about a week untill all the time servers recognize Israel standard time.

Please ensure that your EPG is correct tomorrow! Even if your timezone and the system clock are ok, providers may forget to change the time offset and you'll see a shift. Let me know if any script provides wrong times!

MegaEPG 1.0.3 has been released (see the Downloads section). This is a maintenance release. The only change is a significant channels update: Sport1, Sport2, Sport5 Live, Sport5 Gold, Food, LBC, IETV, TVRI, Daystar, Inter+, Ego Total, Amateur, Raduga and others were added/updated. HOT scripts were updated in order to obtain new channels as well.

If you read this, the site has been successfully moved to the new hosting. Posting to the forum is allowed and new users may register again. Please report problems to pvr at pvr co il. Please allow few days of instability till the site transition is complete.

MegaEPG 1.0.2 beta has been released (see the Downloads section). vista_he script now parses the subtitle and episode numbers. This is important for people that record series. The previous fix of the exception in the script (empty show category) is also in the release. I slightly changed the output format of the MCE EPG file for better series processing therefore the release is declared as beta. I do not expect any problems with it however.