Phillie14586

TV Guide not updating

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jpMist27...I gleaned what I posted from the web...there is a lengthy description of the company on Wikipedia which also cautions that it may contain "inaccuracies" and incomplete information...here's the *link*

               <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiVo_Corporation>

Thanks all for the descriptions of how to handle multiple EyeTV Archives!

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On 4/10/2019 at 11:04 AM, jpmist27 said:

After my early suspicions that Geniatech intended to let its TV Guide service just die, it looks like it has come to a successful "arrangement" with the Rovi Corporation for continued access to their listings service.

That was the part I was curious about, thinking you'd read some recent article about Rovi contracting with TV Guide.

Thanks for the "thanks" but I wasn't in that conversation. (Edit: Oops, maybe that wasn't directed to me. . .) We all use eyeTV differently I suppose, my use and the reason you have to tear EyeTV from my cold dead hands is the DVR controls. I watch almost nothing in real time because commercial skipping is so effortless. Plus I can watch a football game in 50 minutes thanks to the custom skip forward controls. I use different settings to watch golf and basketball, but baseball is impossible. No one else has that, either because Geniatech has the patent for it or Comcast and AT&T simply wants skipping commercials with their DVRs to be cumbersome.

For my content management, I like the excellent ElGato Turbo.264 HD stick with it's excellent software to shrink the EyeTv recordings down and store 'em on an external drive. The HD Turbo stick pops up on eBay from time to time and with it's software it makes archiving pretty easy.  

Edited by jpmist27

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On 4/4/2019 at 4:43 PM, Earl Noe said:

I find a file Digital Antenna (ATSC) - Channels in Boot Drive > Library>Application Support>EyeTV>Locations

Getinfo says it is a file opened by EyeTV. I can open it with TextWrangler (TextEdit won't open it) and it turns out to be my channels list as a .plist file.

Thanks for that! I knew it had to be somewhere. I discovered that TextWrangler is no more, bought up by BBedit, which I tried and I still couldn't see the channels listed. No biggie, but good to know for sure which file to archive.

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1 hour ago, chuckles67 said:

With the paid TV Guide not working, and HD HomeRun support dropped,  I've started using the SiliconDust DVR service on a NAS server, alongside EyeTV (7520) on a Mac Mini.   Despite a learning curve for the UI and, of course different feature sets..., overall the SiliconDust is getting the job done: MPEG .TS files are being saved to my NAS hard disk from guide-driven series recordings from my HDHomeRun tuner.  I can easily edit/trim/convert these recordings using other standalone software.

I think the final blow for EyeTV for me just happened last night.  Recording the final episode of the latest season of a popular comedy, partway through the EyeTV/Mac Mini setup had a panic and the OS rebooted to the login screen.  Failed recording.  Meanwhile the SiliconDust DVR NAS setup completed recording - and that's what truly matters.

Good luck with EyeTV folks, but for me it really is time to put my annual subscription money elsewhere.  Five years of using EyeTV, I'll certainly miss the video scrub editing user interface and ability to edit smart recording schedules.  Moving forward I simply need reliable recording with a supported guide, and I'll use other tools to post-process.

I'm guessing that you will keep you Mac Mini at MacOS 10.14 or lower (to avoid the 64 bit trap).  Just out of curiosity, what software do you use to edit the .TS files?

G

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3 hours ago, chuckles67 said:

Good luck with EyeTV folks,

I have never had a recording failure with EyeTV that wasn't user error. I wish my other applications, like browsers, were as reliable.

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'jpNist27'...I don't watch much EyeTV programming in real time either, but I take the extra step of actually editing out the commercials before watching playback so I get roughly 42 minutes of an hour's program content without touching a remote to FF past the commercials. I also agree with Earl, that infrequent failure to record with EyeTV has mostly been user error.

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I still have an active TV Guide subscription, so I downloaded the beta mentioned above and tried it on a spare computer.  No trouble logging into EyeTV, and the service now says EyeTVEPGPremium - USA and Canada with the TV Guide expiration date.  After some fiddling around in Setup, I managed to import my channel list from my real EyeTV installation and ran the program guide update.  I saw the grid start filling up and thought "Voila!", but unfortunately it only gets a (random?) subset of the total channels.  Anyway, it looks like they're very close!

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21 hours ago, Rick Evarts said:

I still have an active TV Guide subscription, so I downloaded the beta mentioned above and tried it on a spare computer.  No trouble logging into EyeTV, and the service now says EyeTVEPGPremium - USA and Canada with the TV Guide expiration date.  After some fiddling around in Setup, I managed to import my channel list from my real EyeTV installation and ran the program guide update.  I saw the grid start filling up and thought "Voila!", but unfortunately it only gets a (random?) subset of the total channels.  Anyway, it looks like they're very close!

Nice going, thanks for spending the time. So this computer didn't have a prior EyeTV install, so no EyeTV files in the System? Where I got lost is the "import my channel list part", since I've never done that. Any chance you could manually add the missing channels?

2021885950_SS-2019-04-15at11_55_00AM.jpg.91d659169b2cab5f3f091861ed8ff08e.jpg

 

The beta has been out for a month and I was hoping they'd have a final version released by now, but I gather from what you reported, it's just not ready yet. . .

 

 

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8 hours ago, jpmist27 said:

Nice going, thanks for spending the time. So this computer didn't have a prior EyeTV install, so no EyeTV files in the System? Where I got lost is the "import my channel list part", since I've never done that. Any chance you could manually add the missing channels?

The computer I installed it on did have some older version of EyeTV on it, although I had only ever used it for OTA recording (Olympics!), so it didn’t have my DirecTV channels on it.  I followed the instructions from an earlier post in this chain on how to export a channel list from one EyeTV installation and import it into another.  All the channels do show up in the channel list, but for some reasons not all channels get populated in the guide.

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41 minutes ago, Rick Evarts said:

but for some reasons not all channels get populated in the guide.

Did you go to the drop-down menu for each individual channel and select the new guide?  Does the drop-down on each channel show "TV Guide" or something new?  Is "xmltv" still in the list also? 

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4 hours ago, UnixGuy said:

Did you go to the drop-down menu for each individual channel and select the new guide?  Does the drop-down on each channel show "TV Guide" or something new?  Is "xmltv" still in the list also? 

I did a select all in the Channels list and changed them all to EyeTVEPGPremium - there are 1105 channels! 

image.png.f1fdfcedbca6c5c990f011aa198facfe.png

TV Guide is gone from the dropdown, replaced by the new one.  xmltv is still there.

I should also have mentioned earlier that I was doing the export/import of the channel list because even though all my zip code's providers show up in the setup window, it never showed the right Service and never downloaded a channel list.

image.png.73a0a32b995c42390e5457aaa547f18d.png

 

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Folks,

I've been lurking here since the OP.  I enjoyed many years of EyeTV and really didnt want to let go.  I'm impressed by all the workaround knowledge here but just didnt have the appetite to jump into it.  Just wanted an out of the box solution that would plug and play.

Decided to try the new Tablo Quad.  Yup, a complete shift in interface but it works really well for my needs.  Add to that the four tuner capability and browser interface that lets me easily watch on any machine/TV/iPad in the house. Also, this should work for the foreseeable future as OSX moves to all 64 bit.  

I did need to upgrade my antenna and did just buy the lifetime subscription service.  For the equipment and subscription I laid out about $500.  Not cheap but I'm hoping to ride this set up for the next few years.  My neighbor pays Comcash $180 a month, so I dont feel too bad about the cash outlay.

Tablo also just released their automatic ad skipping algorithm.  Will be testing that out in the next few weeks.

So far, so good.

Mark

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On 4/11/2019 at 8:56 AM, geohough said:

I'm guessing that you will keep you Mac Mini at MacOS 10.14 or lower (to avoid the 64 bit trap).  Just out of curiosity, what software do you use to edit the .TS files?

G

Yup the Mac Mini is running an older MacOS build - currently El Capitan.  Moving forward without EyeTV, I'll be able to move to 64 bit whenever that seems right.

To edit .TS files on Mac OS I'm using the free MPEGStreamClip but it requires an MPEG-2 install which I purchased a long time back from Apple.  The interface is not as good as EyeTV, but you can cut out sections on a timeline at the nearest frame, then convert the final trimmed .TS to an MPEG.  This workflow was how I was using EyeTV.

If I ever go back to Windows (if...) I own a licence for TMPGEnc MPEG Editor 3  software which will do the same.

 

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On 4/11/2019 at 11:18 AM, Earl Noe said:

I have never had a recording failure with EyeTV that wasn't user error. I wish my other applications, like browsers, were as reliable.

That's great that you do not experience recording failures - for the first three years, EyeTV was very reliable for me too.

For some unknown reason for the last two years occasionally I experience a system panic when recording with EyeTV, maybe once every 20 to 30 recordings.  I'll see the Mac OS X login password screen, then see a failed recording in EyeTV.  It's a situation where I'm not motivated to ask tech support for help as it seems a waste of my time: it's impossible to duplicate and likely is some complex cross-platform/application thing. At one stage I thought it was due to using a Fusion drive, but that turned out not to be the case after making a fresh install on a non-Fusion drive.

Moving forward I need a TV guide recording solution that has long-term support for the HDHomeRun.  Since EyeTV dropped that ball, I figure HDHomeRun manufacturer SiliconDust is a good choice (as I already said, I'll miss EyeTV's great user interface - video scrub editing, smart guide recording - hey-ho).

Edited by chuckles67

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Interesting anomaly here...after successfully completing the recommended "step-by-step" for getting schedules.direct to provide my guide and schedule service via .xmltv, I somehow boggled the auto-update script in the Home/Library/Launch Agents folder and proceeded to tinker with that for a few days and it wasn't auto-updating. I must have finally gotten it right now, but  with a twist.

Even though I pared down my local cable-listing inventory at schedules.direct, days ago. this morning I found that EyeTV's Channels listing now shows the entire world of channels my cable provider offers are back. That surprised me because as I changed the "xmltv" pull-down for each channel in my much smaller listing of desired channels, I "deleted" all the channels EyeTV was showing that were unchecked and showing "Nome" for Guide-provider. Last night's first-time successful update put all the unchecked channels back in my EyeTV Channels window even though the Program Guide in EyeTV still only showed program information for the channel inventory I wanted and indeed the end of that update of Guide listings had moved ahead to 2 weeks and two days into the future beyond where it was set originally before I had the auto-update in the right order of things. No big deal, I guess...just was surprised to see all of those unwanted channels back in my list.

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3 hours ago, chuckles67 said:

occasionally I experience a system panic when recording with EyeTV,

I've never had a system panic for any reason, so I can't comment. The HD Homerun and EyeTV software I got some years ago for around $200 are still working fine with the xmltv guide solution described in this forum. If for some reason I find I can't live without a 64-bit OS, and the present setup is still working as good as it is now, I'll probably just dedicate my present mid-2010 mini to EyeTV.

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I see that there's a new version (Release Candidate) of EyeTV available.  The notes say that it supports the new guide.  My setup has two HD Homeruns, so I'm stuck on 7520.  The website still says that the guide is "out of stock".  Can anyone on 7520 who still has a subscription check the guide as see if it works again?  If it does, then maybe I can download the new version, subscribe to the guide, then roll back to 7520.    My guess is that the guide will be exclusive to 7524.

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On the HDHomeRun point: I dug into the (7520) release a while back* and found an assortment of HDHR firmware and device icons. I copied the HDHR resources out, zipped the existing (7520) application, installed Build (7524), and drag-copied the HDHR resources from the older build into the relevant locations.

Didn't work; the (7524) build didn't give me any option to select the HDHR. I suspect there are a few .plists in the older build where the SiliconDust hardware is listed as menu options, but I'm already a little out of my depth; I'm not clear how to edit the corresponding .plists in the newer builds to add HDHR as a signal source. Assuming that trick would work, which I also don't know.

* Right-click/control-click on EyeTV application icon>Show Package Contents; copy Contents>Resources>Firmware>HDHomeRun and HDHR-relevant icons from Contents>Resources>Device Pictures onto Desktop; transfer to new version of application

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26 minutes ago, PickleRick said:

I see that there's a new version (Release Candidate) of EyeTV available.  The notes say that it supports the new guide.  My setup has two HD Homeruns, so I'm stuck on 7520.  The website still says that the guide is "out of stock".  Can anyone on 7520 who still has a subscription check the guide as see if it works again?  If it does, then maybe I can download the new version, subscribe to the guide, then roll back to 7520.    My guess is that the guide will be exclusive to 7524.

I was going to try it, but it's a lower build than the beta I currently have installed (7527).  The description talks about "Update eyetv plus – renew activation / subscription", which I don't think is the same as EyeTVEPGPremium where I'm getting the new guide.  At least it's a completely different button, and when I select United States it says not available in my country yet:

image.png.f165de3c45a1876585186c348ee27cef.png

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9 hours ago, chuckles67 said:

Yup the Mac Mini is running an older MacOS build - currently El Capitan.  Moving forward without EyeTV, I'll be able to move to 64 bit whenever that seems right.

To edit .TS files on Mac OS I'm using the free MPEGStreamClip but it requires an MPEG-2 install which I purchased a long time back from Apple.  The interface is not as good as EyeTV, but you can cut out sections on a timeline at the nearest frame, then convert the final trimmed .TS to an MPEG.  This workflow was how I was using EyeTV.

If I ever go back to Windows (if...) I own a licence for TMPGEnc MPEG Editor 3  software which will do the same.

 

Thanks!  I picked up the latest MPEG Streamclip (it's 64 bit) and I still have the old MPEG-2 install that I got from Apple eons ago!  I've been moaning and groaning knowing that my Quicktime 7 Pro is going away.  I'll give this a shot.

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If people are looking for alternative solutions, the following may be of interest.

I finally set up a ChannelMaster Stream+ (CM-7600) DVR that I got some time ago.  It is actually an Android platform that comes with built-in apps but one can also add apps from the Google Play Store.  The main built-in app is Google Live TV.  This allows DVR-like recording and playback.  Recording is done from a 14-day TV guide in a grid format like EyeTV.  One can record either a specific show or a series.  The TV guide is apparently free---no subscription cost.  However, the meta-data seems to be relatively sparse in terms of the information it gives about a show.  The unit has two builtin tuners, and one can attach an external USB hard drive for storage.

From comments by users, it appears one can somehow add a Silicon Dust app that will recognize suitable HDHomerun tuners, but I haven't tried that.  I don't think the added tuners are usable by the Live TV app.

I tried to add the EyeTV Android app but it didn't seem to be accessible in the Google Play store.  There may be some complicated way of "sideloading" an unsupported app, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

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Emailed 'Angela' and was sent a link to a new beta (build 7527, app name EyeTV DBG) and while it's far from perfect it is working!  Setup the link to my set top box and channel changer, allowed me to manually add channels (that's the biggest flaw - doesn't fetch a channel list), and is downloading schedules.  They are getting there!

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17 hours ago, wszilasi said:

Emailed 'Angela' and was sent a link to a new beta (build 7527, app name EyeTV DBG) and while it's far from perfect it is working!  Setup the link to my set top box and channel changer, allowed me to manually add channels (that's the biggest flaw - doesn't fetch a channel list), and is downloading schedules.  They are getting there!

Were you required to have a paid-for (if non-functioning) TV-Guide subscription in order for the beta to install? --And/or, in order for the beta to start downloading schedules?

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18 hours ago, LevanahT said:

Were you required to have a paid-for (if non-functioning) TV-Guide subscription in order for the beta to install? --And/or, in order for the beta to start downloading schedules?

Not sure if it's required but I do have one, the process looks exactly like a normal TV Guide setup, there is just different guide data coming thorugh

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