Raffles wrote:Now that the work to get the AltEPG running is apparently finished
Erk, hang on a minute
Unfortunately it is nowhere near finished. Development of the core guide data backend has been slower than we'd all hoped, for example we haven't got TmsIds in the guide data yet which may well be the cause of people's recent Season Pass errors. After that, Original Air Dates being present in the data would enable the "first run only" feature - but that needs a big database change. Then there's all the other things like accented characters in the data (which barf up our process and cause extra work on a daily basis not to mention looking wrong on TiVos) as well as synopses being chopped in the middle of sentences, etc. Add to that, a whole bunch of backend processes which are all manual and not trivial to automate.
That's before you even start on the problems of the contents/quality/reliability of the incoming guide data, and all the work done every single day to continually correct it manually, because we can't yet automatically import schedule updates. If only we could, then we'd have miles more time to turn to the other parts of the development of the service!
Basically what we all have at the moment is a half-way house where we can make recordings on our TiVos and carry on for the time being, but there's miles too much manual work propping it all up to be sustainable in the medium to long term. People don't necessarily have visibility of this though, so it's understandable if they got the wrong impression and thought that this service was the "finished" one.
Raffles wrote:is there any prospect of an improved IR code capture and distribution process? I'll help where I can but coding is not in my skill-set.
Cool! It's definitely one of the extra things we want to do and healeydave mentioned he had already made some codes for some STBs. It's a question of creating a new IR database slice somehow. (I would personally want to take the opportunity to strip out all the millions of American set-top-boxes that are irrelevant, confusing and annoying, leaving only the ones we want.)