Earl Noe

I joined the TitanTV site (free). When you click on a program listing a box opens with a red button to click record. Titan sends a small file via your browser, which EyeTV is able to read and set a recording. This doesn't appear in the grid, but should show up in Schedules. The Titan TV grid for my area has many superfluous listings that I don't actually receive, but listings can be customized by hiding irrelevant stations and changing the order channels are listed. This is hardly an ideal setup. It is intended for remotely scheduling, but it is an alternative than can be explored. At least this can be consulted for more detail than the EPG listings provide.

I took a look at the Plex website. It's a whole other set of software, with a bewildering array of options I don't really need. I also looked at TitanTV. The schedule will need a whole lot of customizing, but at least it is customizable. All I need is a program guide/scheduler, and I have a very bad feeling about the TV Guide outfit. It works fine, but I wouldn't be too surprised if they just discontinued offering their services for EyeTV.

Right. I remember now. If you change to ATSC and then go to that channel it populates the grid. Let us know how Plex works out.

I'd prefer to continue with the Guide as it is, but I'm trying to work out some fallback methods in case the company has just capriciously decided to stop supplying guide information, as they did for broadcast stations. Manual programming is no picnic either.

I have had EyeTv construct a basic EPG from information in the broadcast stream before, but it is not doing that now. I need to review the manual. The information is rudimentary when this feature is working, and it does not go very far into the future, but it behaves otherwise like the guide. My EyeTV does respond to the scheduling files TitanTV sends to the computer. I have scheduled a couple of programs in this way, and we shall see if they work. Programs scheduled in this way do not seem to show up in the grid, except the time bar up at the top turns pink for the period of time covered. Programs I have scheduled via TitanTV do show up in Schedules. We'll see if they actually record and what info appears in Recordings. I wonder if these problems have anything with the FCC selling off local frequencies, requiring some translators and stations to go to new frequencies, and requiring EyeTV to rescan. Information given to local stations seems quite vague, i.e. "sometime after the first of the year." So far, the stations affected in my area have either not received new frequencies or are still off the air. No doubt the idiotic sh!tdown of the gubmit is not helping this situation. I'll post results of my experiments.

I don't have much confidence in the TV Guide company. A few years back they abruptly quit providing guide service for broadcast stations. This completely bricked an expensive Sony DVR that I owned, which was designed by total fools without any means of the user setting the date and time. So while it was possible in theory to manually set recordings, it involved complex calculations to convert the real date/time into the DVR's erroneous date/time. This clusterflock was what caused me to start using EyeTV in the first place. I don't understand why EyeTV is not constructing any schedule from the basic EPG data broadcast by the stations. It is supposed to do this and has done this in the past when the guide subscription ran out, so something is seriously amiss. It may be possible to schedule EyeTV programming using the free TitanTV service, but I have not really tried to get this working. It is at least possible to look up local schedules, though manually setting recordings will not be any picnic.