Project Lounge

Bringing the PC to the world of AV.

By Scott Bartley / Tuesday, September 29 2009

So far in our journey through the savage wilderness of the home theatre PC landscape we’ve looked at hardware options, operating systems and media centre interfaces. If we’ve learned one thing from all this experimentation, it’s that there’s no single, all encompassing solution – some level of compromise is going to be required to get a home theatre PC up and running. And when it comes to compromise, there’s none greater than the hoops we must jump through to get a working electronic programming guide (EPG for short, and if you’re still lost, it refers to an interactive list of the coming weeks’ TV programming) up and running.

The problem stems from a couple of areas. First, in New Zealand the various broadcasters treat their TV listings as a copyrighted piece of literature. This means anyone wanting to republish the listings must pay a fee or risk breaking the law and being slapped silly by an army of intellectual property lawyers. This makes sense for a company such as Sky TV who use the EPG as a major selling point of their MySky HDi device, yet for free-to-air broadcasters such as TVNZ and Mediaworks, the decision to charge all and sundry for listings information has done nothing more than stop the masses having broader access to their those companies' product. Surely the benefits of having as many people as possible able to quickly and easily find out what shows are on, and when, would outweigh any prospective income to be made from selling the listings? Whatever the logic, that’s how it is and this situation made it impossible for Microsoft to offer TV listings over the internet for their Media Centre.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped any number of enterprising individuals creating their own freely available TV listings that can be integrated into the Media Centre application of your choice. However, this, legally dubious and overly technical solution, doesn’t even come close to being a good choice for the average user as they’re generally too unreliable to trust with your recordings and present too much tweaking to get working in the first place.

Secondly, the wonderful Freeview EPG that is broadcast alongside both their satellite and terrestrial signals is tricky to integrate. The terrestrial signal is broadcast in a format called MHEG5, which just happens to be a format Windows Media Centre can’t use. The satellite signal is perfectly useable if you’re using a satellite TV tuner in your PC but this has the downside of not offering high definition.

One possible solution here is to install two tuners, one connected to a satellite dish which can then receive the EPG via satellite and a second tuner connected to a UHF aerial. Details of how to do this can be found in seconds via Google, but again, this is yet another convoluted solution to what should be a simple matter.

Installing an unofficial EPG requires a certain amount of technical knowhow and a willingness to turn a blind eye to what is, essentially, copyright infringement. Of all the methods we researched, not a one was what we’d consider user-friendly. However, if you’re keen to find out more the best place to visit is either our own PressF1.co.nz help forum or the friendly geeks over at Geekzone.co.nz forums (the HTPC section). In the meantime we can only hope (and we’ve heard murmurings and rumours for a while now, without result) that an official solution is on the cards. But we’re not holding our breath.