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Sunday 31 May 2009

Live TV with EPG in Media Center comes to Thailand

I’ve been wanting to get this working for a long time now and we finally have a solution for integrating live TV from True Visions in to Windows 7 Media Center.

True Visions offer both Satellite and Cable TV, we have only tested this so far using a satellite dish and a FloppyDTV S2 and also a FireDTV S/CI.

This is still work in progress, but as you can see from the below screen shots we have EPG data in Media Center for the TV channels, I believe this is a first in Thailand using Windows 7 Media Center!

We used the Big Screen EPG beta application written by Niall Ginsbourg to import the XMLTV data in to Media Center.

I’d like to give Niall a massive thank you for his help with this project.

If anyone is interested in Live TV / PVR functionality within Windows Media Center here in Thailand, then please feel free to contact me and I can put you in touch with a CEDIA registered custom installation company in this region.

True Visions EPG data in Windows 7 Media Center

Click the screen shots for larger images.

EPG1

EPG2

EPG3

EPG4

There’s a mixture of English and Thai language in the EPG, depending on what data is being imported in to Media Center from the XMLTV grabber.

EPG5

EPG6

EPG7

We can potentially have up to a full month of program guide data.

EPG8

Record Live TV

EPG9

Mini Guide

LiveTV2

Program Info

LiveTV

Big Screen EPG is currently in beta state and will be a commercial application when it is released.

BSE1

We added logos to the majority of the TV Channels.

BSE2

Custom XMLTV Provider.

BSE3

Clubhouse Tags: clubhouse”, media center”, story”, Live TV”, EPG”, Thailand”, True Visions

6 comments:

Mark said...

I've got this running in Hong Kong for NOW broadband "cable." What are you using to generate the XMLTV file? I have been using TVxB.

CW-KID said...

Hi, all I can say is I am not using TVxB as it does not seem to work for us.

Unknown said...

Hey Stuart, good old google to find your blog. Like minded person here.

I'm on the case to get win 7 media center with TrueVisions/Dtsv/Multichoice coming in via a dreambox500s

I was looking at the HAVA box to be the missing link to push the dreambox channels through to the Media center as its sattellite and it appears one of the few ways to do it and control it. I need to be confident my solution will work seemlessly before i try and get one of these boxes shipped over to Thailand.

I'd love to hear more on your experiences and knowledge of getting all this working, including the EPG which has me scratching my head a bit (among other things!)

Lets chat

G

eTiMaGo said...

Hi,

Great post, but a question... where do you actually get the XML file?

I'm not using Media Center, but building a TV on demand system for a hotel, and it would be great to show an automated EPG in the interface, but I cannot seem to find a source!

Thomas

eTiMaGo said...

Hi Stuart,

Thanks for this excellent post!

I'm not using Media Center, but building an interface for a hotel with VOD and TV channels streaming, and would love to implement EPGs as well. So, where do you get the up to date EPG info? I cannot seem to find any source :(

Thomas

CW-KID said...

The developer of Big Screen EPG wrote a scrapper for me to access the True Visions website and pull down the EPG data.