Archive for the ‘Free*EPG’ Category
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 …
Free*EPG Registrations Suspended For August
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, Free*EPG on August 24th, 2008
To preserve the quality of service for our existing subscribers and try to reduce costs, we are suspending new user subscriptions to our Free*EPG XMLTV and Windows Media Center services for the month of August.
Who’d figure that the Olympics would increase the demand for Media Center installations and guide data … To the point where we received 75 new registrations in one single day! Our service is now running at over 10,000 active Windows Media Center and XMLTV machines per month, and the number of new users is growing faster and faster every day! The unfortunate downside is that our bandwidth, time and cost requirements have also blown out over this Olympic period!
New users should consider using our client-based XMLTV: Guide Pack to access XMLTV and Windows Media Center EPG data this month.
Users with existing Free*EPG accounts will not be affected.
Starting to feel the financial pinch, OUCH!
Posted by banger@epgstream in Free*EPG, Windows Vista & XP, XMLTV on August 20th, 2008
After starting our Windows Media Center guide service (Free*EPG) in June 2006, we’ve seen a lot happen in the EPG world, especially in Australia! Over the years the number of homes with media centers have sky-rocketed and we hit over 10,000 active users in August 2008!
Our original service launched in 2006 provided a simple interface for Windows Media Center users in Australia to download their EPG. Only Sydney was supported in the early days, until we decided to incorporate data from the ozTiVo community which saw us distribute data nation wide. Today, our servers receive thousands of download requests every day for that precious EPG.
In most organisations this would be fantastic news with hundreds of new user subscriptions rolling in every month, but not for us … [Un]fortunately epgStream.net is a not-for-profit organisation and we are funded through the kindness of our subscribers, so it can be financially lean some months! The increase in user subscriptions to our service has placed more demand on our server and bandwidth resources, but there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in donations. We don’t require a lot of financial support, but Needless to say donations had run dry a few times leaving us “out of pocket” when our regular hosting bills arrived.
Free*EPG MCE Service Discontinued (PayTV)
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, Free*EPG on July 23rd, 2008
epgStream.net will be discontinuing their Free*EPG Pay TV feed which currently includes FOXTEL, AUSTAR and Optus TV packages on Sunday 27th July 2008. Due to the high amount of overhead required to maintain, compile and distribute we have decided to cease providing this service.
Our Pay TV subscribers count as a small part of our overall subscription, but consume over 50% of our costs and processing resources. This month our subscription base exceeded 10,000+ active users, but unfortunately donations and funding for this service have remained at a constant low for the past 12 months. This funding short fall means we are constantly out of pocket each month as we pay for hosting and registration costs.
Existing Pay TV users are advised to use our wmcGuideServiceProxy and xmltvDownload client services to source their EPG data. Please consult our brief FAQ on how to use these tools together by clicking here.
Many thanks to Pay TV users who have made donations in the past. If you have made a donation in the last 6 months and would like your donation returned (minus PayPal fees) then please feel free to send a private message with your information to banger@epgStream or email to customer.service@epgstream.net.
Free-to-air services will remain unchanged.
Free*EPG XMLTV Service v2.0 Now Available!
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, Free*EPG, XMLTV on April 2nd, 2008
Double What The?!? We’ve followed ozTiVo.net’s lead and now have a new XMLTV service which is more grabber friendly! This new service uses HTTP caching so it’s fast and will allow grabbers to specify the amount of data they need per channel.
To get the ball rolling we’ve created a free Windows 2000/XP/Vista grabber named xmltvDownload which will allow you to download XMLTV data from ozTiVo.net or epgStream.net.
Read more about accessing our new XMLTV Guide Service 2.0 here.
ozTiVo.net Guide API Integration
Posted by banger@epgstream in Free*EPG, XMLTV on February 13th, 2008
Over the next week or two we’ll be cutting over to a new ozTiVo.net feed interface (refer this announcement). Even though we don’t expect any problems, there is still always the possibility that a few gremlins might creep into the works.
If you notice channel data missing, incorrect timezones or incorrect data then please let us know!
Free*EPG XMLTV Service Now Available!
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, Free*EPG, XMLTV on February 1st, 2008
What The?!? Yup, we’ve setup a simple, easy-to-use XMLTV service interface and it’s now available for all those non-Windows Media Center users to use! This means that clients like Media Portal, WebScheduler, Meedio, MythTV, etc can now take advantage of all the programme guide data available from epgStream.net.
Read more about accessing this service on our forum: http://forum.epgstream.net/viewforum.php?f=18
XMLTV? Time to kick-start that ‘ole project off again!
Posted by banger@epgstream in Electronic Programme Guide, Free*EPG on December 18th, 2007
Originally Posted by jrobbo, Oct 31 2007, 06:17 PM
http://forums.dvbowners.com/index.php?showtopic=8596
Hey Guys,
As advised, tomorrows XMLTV guides (1st November) will be the last I will be generating. I will delete all of the caches tonight to ensure that everything is generated fresh tomorrow, so hopefully there will be at least 4 or 5 days of good data to keep you going until other sources become available.
I subscribed to IceTV today, and on first impressions, the data looks pretty good. IceTV contacted me last week and offered me a 12 month subscription with a 25% discount, and they have also extended that offer to anyone else who was using my guides and wants to switch over, just send me an email to dvbowners@jrobbo.com for details on how to apply. In the interests of full disclosure, IceTV have also offered to give me an extra months free subscription for anyone who takes up this offer, just want to make sure you guys know what I get out of this. If this is of some use to you, that’s great. Please note that this offer is only open until the end of November
Anyway, I wish you guys the best of success in securing a new, reliable source of EPG data, whichever source you use. FWIW, the whole reason I began generating the EPG guides several years ago was to help out the guys on this forum, and only on this forum, i’ve never advertised it or talked about it anywhere else but here. Unfortunately, word spread and it got the point where several thousand people were downloading new guides every day, and that’s the barrage of not-so-nice emails came from when things went wrong.
All the best
Cheers
John
Well bugger me! Looks like a really great XMLTV data source has dried up! The guys here at epgStream.net can really appreciate the heart-ache JRobbo went through putting together his guide and it’s a shame it’s come to an end! Mind you nobody told us (as it happened in October/November), but it should have clicked when we started getting quite a few enquiries about XMLTV.
Now that there appears to be a gap in the XMLTV providers, and we are generating our Free*EPG feed, we might look at providing XMLTV data … for real! The only thing stopping us before was the fact that you could just as easily get your data from ozTiVo!
Anyway, shows what a very delicate ecosystem the EPG world is. Anyone got a favourite XMLTV guide source they use or have heard of?
It’s a High Definition kinda month!
Posted by banger@epgstream in Announcements, Free*EPG on December 15th, 2007
This month sees Channel 7 and Network 10 go all out for Christmas and give Australia new High Definition television programming!
We’re all still waiting for Channel 9 to come to the HD party though … But in the meantime enjoy your Free*EPG HD listings! Thanks ozTiVo.net!
A Very Un-Merry Christmas!
Posted by banger@epgstream in Free*EPG on December 12th, 2007
This has to be the most time-consuming month ever for epgStream.net! We’ve had cause to believe D44-ACC bumped off Channels 7SD, 7HD, 9SD and 9HD off … We’ve had 7HD listing tweaks and finally yesterday we had multiple missing channel data from a few states around Australia and not to mention ISP issues!
We were happy when we diagnosed the most recent missing multi-channel data issue and were busy reloading the data when *ZAP*, power off, lights off and non-UPS servers off. Now the only server without UPS just happens to be our epgStream.net Guide Database server, which after reboot proceeded to direct us to database restore from last month.
The long-and-the-short of it is we’re rolling forward the last 3 weeks worth of data and re-generating the guides for this week (then performing a backup). If you notice any guide channel data issues after about midday today let us know and it might have been something we missed in the restore.
