Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category
On Holidays For 7 Days!
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements on October 14th, 2009
epgStream.net is going to to unavailable for the next 7 days while we are on holidays. This will mean new or replacement licenses will not be issued between Sunday, 11th of October and Monday, 19th of October.
Sorry about the week of downtime but after 6 months of intense contract work it’s time for a quick break!
epgStream.net Update!
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, News on August 18th, 2009
Work, travel, babies, marriages, puppies and illness! It’s been a heck of a few months for us here at epgStream, but it looks like September sees our calendar clearing!
Yup, it looks like there is a good chance things will be settling down and we’ll be able to pick up on our hobby projects this coming September/October! This is great because it gives us a chance to unwind and also to crank up epgStream.net.
Bigger news (incase you haven’t already heard on the grapevine) is that we’ve been approached by a third party who has expressed interest in purchasing our client/server software solutions. This could present quite an interesting scenario having a full-time business entity take over development and support of our EPG products!!!
ozTiVo Channel Updates
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, Electronic Programme Guide, XMLTV: Guide Pack on June 7th, 2009
Well it looks like the ozTiVo guys have redefined (and renamed) some of their “One” and “SBS” guide listings! Everyone will be happy to know that “SBS2″ now has guide listings and “One HD” and “One Digital” listings have now been broken down by their individual states.
The bad news is that we can’t update the channel changes until Monday night, being the long weekend and all. The good news is you can just update the channels yourself with the following, simplified steps:
- Launch the “XMLTV Download Settings” application.
- Navigate to and click on the “Channels” tab.
- Click the “Download Channel List” button.
- To add your “One HD“ channel, type “one-” (notice the hyphen) in the search box and select by checking the One HD channel for your region.
- To add your “SBS TWO“ channel, type “sbstwo” in the search box and select by checking the SBS TWO channel for your region.
- Click the “Save Changes” button to save your updated channel list.
- Click the “Close” button to exit the “XMLTV Download Settings” application.
From there it’s just a matter of re-downloading your guide data by launching the “XMLTV Download” application. Once the XMLTV download has completed, perform the following to see your new channels:
- Launch Windows Media Center.
- Navigate to: Tasks->Settings->TV->Guide
- Perform a “Get Latest Guide Listings” to import the newly added channel data.
- Perform a “Add Listings to Channel” to include the new channels. First select the TV channel, then select the guide to use.
Simple as that. If you need to edit the channel name of time zone settings then launch the “XMLTV Download Settings” application, select your channel and “right-click” it for more editing options. Likewise if you want to edit more channel information, just launch the “Guide Service Proxy Settings” applications for more options.
Needless to say, most users should be familiar with this configuration … Unless we’ve spoilt you with our Guide Wizard application? 
Problem with One HD listings fixed!
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, XMLTV: Guide Pack on April 8th, 2009
I’ve had a few reports from users that their One Digital listings were available but One HD wasn’t! On further investigation it seems that I left out the One HD settings for some “generic” state settings.
If, for example, you selected your region as “NSW” then your One HD channel would be missing. However if you selected a more specific region, such as “NSW – Sydney (CBD)”, then you’d be watching your One HD sport in all it’s glory …
The configuration has been updated so you should be able to re-run the “Guide Wizard” to update your Windows Media Center settings to get One HD information again.
One Digital and One HD updates … Complete!
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, XMLTV: Guide Pack on April 7th, 2009
Sorry to everyone who was waiting patiently for their Australian Time Zone and One Digital updates on Sunday but as usual it’s busy all round!
All you’ll need to do is run the our “Guide Wizard” application again and it will automatically configure these new changes. After that just open up Windows Media Center and perform a manual “Get Latest Guide Listing“.
Enjoy!
One Digital and One HD updates.
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, Windows Vista & XP, XMLTV: Guide Pack on March 31st, 2009
This weekend, in conjunction with our daylight saving changes, we’ll be updating our XMLTV: Guide Pack channel mappings. This will mean that if you run our “Guide Wizard” application on or after Sunday, 5th April 2009, you’ll see the following channels defined:
- (#1) One HD
- (#10) Ten Digital
- (#11) One HD
- (#12) One Digital
Users won’t have to re-run their channel scan setup again to view these new channels. All you should need to do is perform a manual “Add Channel Listings” from within your Windows Media Center setup.
Daylight savings comes to an end!
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, Electronic Programme Guide, Windows Vista & XP, XMLTV: Guide Pack on March 31st, 2009
Well it’s that time of year again when daylight savings comes to an end and all the various states go back to “Queensland” time again.
Tasmania, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and South Australia will wrap up daylight savings on Sunday, 5th April 2009. Western Australia will finish earlier on the Sunday, 29th March 2009 (err… last week).
We’ll be doing a bulk update of our XMLTV Guide Pack online configuration so all you have to do is re-run our “Guide Wizard” application on Sunday morning and you times should be back to normal!
Don’t forget to set your wall and digital clocks back 1 hour @ 3:00 am and remember that your Windows XP and Vista machines should automatically adjust the time for you!
Reference: Implementation Dates of Daylight Savings Time within Australia
Poor Hosting Service for February/March
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, Random Thoughts on March 1st, 2009
Just when I thought i was going to have a lazy weekend, sleeping in and catching up on UFC® 95 SANCHEZ vs STEVENSON with my new fiancé, my web hosting provider has to go and stuff it up …
Our current service provider, <name withheld for the moment>, has had shocking service levels since the beginning of this year. Mysterious outages, conflicting support staff reports, unexplained server configuration changes and slow responses are making me think long and hard about whether we should stay with our current service provider.
Is the current economic recession forcing service providers to replace their previously outsourced Indian support crew with trained monkeys who work for bananas rather than Rupees? Based on the past couple of weeks I wouldn’t be surprised …
All our website service up-times have dropped from an acceptable 99.9% down to a miserable 95.0% … I hear you saying a 5% drop doesn’t really sound all that bad, but it equates to roughly 438 hours (18 days) per year of down-time! Worst of all it seems to happen on the weekends …
What this means for most people is that they will experience a level of frustration when they try to connect to our website/services only to find them offline. Lately users have been faced with the following unfriendly message:
Server Error in ‘/’ Application
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
Apparently, all our .NET web application versions were reset to v1.1 by someone other than us … I’m pointing the finger at service provider staff, who naturally deny it. Oh and our IIS application pool keeps needing to be manually restarted due to recent “undetermined” reasons. 
What this means for epgStream.net is that we have to keep a constant eye on what our web hosting support are doing, which is in effect periodically double checking them to make sure they don’t make any mistakes.
After complaining quite a bit, I’ve been asked to upgrade our hosting service but to be quite honest the last plan upgrade we were told to upgrade to should have *more* than covered our requirements.
I am not convinced I should upgrade our service plan (again) based on the amount of support staff cloak & dagger I’m experiencing. I’m thinking quite seriously about moving everything offsite to another hosting provider such as GoDaddy.com.
XMLTV: Guide Pack 1.00.25 Released
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, XMLTV: Guide Pack on December 10th, 2008
The latest version of our XMLTV: Guide Pack is now available for download!
Free*EPG MCE Service Discontinued (Free-To-Air)
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, Electronic Programme Guide, Free*EPG on October 13th, 2008
Our Free*EPG and ozTiVo Microsoft Windows Guide Service feeds for Australia will be discontinued from Sunday, 20th October 2008.
We recommend all users start using our XMLTV: Guide Pack as soon as possible to avoid delays in guide updates.
What happened?
The same ‘ole sad story: 10,000 Free*EPG subscribers, but less than 1% of ever donated for time and materials over a 2 year period … Kinda depressing when you think about it, but to the 0.85% that did make donations, “THANK YOU!”. Your contributions kept us fuelled up with pizza and kept us (mostly) out of the red when our bills arrived!
Well, we’ve been running this little dog and pony show since 2006. In that time we’ve made a lot of friends, been abused by a few tossers, and been part of a great community base, but during the past two years we’ve always been struggling to find funding and time to work on epgStream.net. After we hit the magical 10,000 user mark a few weeks back we realised that the amount of work and user support wasn’t going to get any easier, so we had to make a decision!
Unfortunately we can’t run this as a free service forever so we decided that it’s almost time for the Free*EPG Team to move on to our next project …
