AltEPG

Hi Everyone,

I would like to just post a brief update, as I'm conscious that any lull of new news to report, seems like nothing is being done.

The OZTivo team are preparing a build of their system for us to tweak for use here, the emulator side of things should be more up-to-date than legacy files floating around the net.

They were going to work on it this weekend, so as its still only Sunday, I'm sitting patiently in anticipation

We have a respectable business data center offering to host the backend server. This seems the logical choice since bandwidth will not be an issue and it appears a DUN presence can also be implemented

As soon as the backend system is online, we will obviously need testers.
No need to volunteer in this thread, I know there are a lot of people keen to give it a try, so we will just post instructions when its ready.


Cheers
Dave.

healeydave wrote:I would like to just post a brief update, as I'm conscious that any lull of new news to report, seems like nothing is being done.

Not in the slighest Dave, what you guys have achieved to date is amazing, much respect to all the folks beavering away, for me I havent got a scoobies what slices and other such things do in our TiVos just glad folks like you and Stephen do (and the rest of you of course )

Furbag

Just a minor update, with this being half-term, a few of us have been bogged down with child minding duties etc

Also, Kitchscamp is working in S.Africa this week.

Cheers.
D.

And now back. Hurrah!

My working schedule is rather fun, I spend a lot of time in the Middle East and Africa, so quite often I can be out of touch for a while. It's not always easy to get access from the "fun" countries, even with a VPN as the connections are *so* slow... I'm back for the next couple of weeks, anyway. My schedule after that depends on who gets overthrown next

Kitschcamppalace wrote:My schedule after that depends on who gets overthrown next

Hell, you could be busy at the current rate of uprisings

Brief update:

The emulation server has been installed, certain components like Perl & SQL are running newer versions than the Oz system, so compatibility work has been done by the Oz guy's (thanks).

Stuart has produced a set of configuration files for the UK system which have been uploaded in preparation.

Anglicisation of the client end (tivo) files is in progress.

There is still much to do, but I believe the new system will be better than the old one!

Thanks for the update.

You have no idea how bad it is for some of us, being so close to this, yet still on the outside.


Alek

Looking good ! I assume your recent dialogue with your tivo contact did not result in any 'spanners being thrown in the works', Dave.

I cannot say this enough : THANKS FOR THIS.

I like the idea

the new system will be better than the old one!

I thought this before. when I look at program data. Using Radiotimes data would be a vast improvement.

I think is going to be great

thanks for all your hard work so far

bri_tal wrote:Looking good ! I assume your recent dialogue with your tivo contact did not result in any 'spanners being thrown in the works', Dave.

The alternative epg wasn't brought up by either party, but I don't see how any spanners could be thrown in even if they wanted to.

Service theft was always frowned upon by the Tivo community as a whole (including ourselves), the definition of that being one who would try to circumvent the system to gain guide data service from tivo and not paying for it.

We are provisioning our own data, we own our own hardware of which there are no subsidies are owed.
After June we will not even be providing a service that duplicates one provided by tivo themselves, we will be substituting one that they have chosen to abandon!

Alek wrote:Thanks for the update. You have no idea how bad it is for some of us, being so close to this, yet still on the outside.

There will be some help required soon, as with most projects , some parts can only be done by one person otherwise you just end up with a duplication of efforts.
We are also fortunate that the OzTivo guy's have been amazing and have short-cut a lot of work for us!
There are parts of the project that will require certain expertise that haven't been reached yet, hence no requests in the "Project Requests" area for a while, however all the skills reported in the "How can I help" thread will cover the requirements.

Hello Dave & team,

I can only echo what a lot of others have been saying about the thanks we all would like to heap on you and all concerned with getting this 'project' off the ground and flying high, it's obvious the OZ team have saved a lot of time in getting this up and running and is wonderful but without a main driver such as yourself it could have been a long drawn out mish-mash of efforts, the icing on the cake of "better than before" is hard to comprehend, how could it be better? TiVo is and always will be the flagship of PVR's I personally can't wait to see the final product, hats of to all.

Yet more thanks and good wishes to everyone involved in the development of the alternate epg!

pemills wrote:the icing on the cake of "better than before" is hard to comprehend, how could it be better? TiVo is and always will be the flagship of PVR's.

I know, its a bold statement, i'll elaborate a little.

Basically, we all loved the original tivo's simplicity and the core features like season passes and wishlists etc. , but since 2003, the system has been stuck in time with the tivo service simply just pushing epg guide data into our beloved boxes.
Of-course there's been the excellent 3rd party tools & hacks like tivoweb, endpad etc that have enhanced our systems functionality.

What I have noticed whilst digging into the excellent work that the other guy's have done (like OzTivo etc) is there are benefits to the new system over the old.

For example, tivo inc would have never pushed out the useful tools like endpad and tivoweb, they were exclusive features to those that hacked or upgraded their tivo's hdd's, where-as they will be a standard part of the core o/s on the alternative epg system.

Small things like dhcp have been fixed / added to the networking side of things.

Also, some of you guy's have been prolific in the community forums over the years giving "heads up" info on guide inaccuracies etc, the new system will allow those changes to be ratified into the database and hence pushed out rather than requiring manual intervention by those that just happened to read the "head's up" threads!
The problem with the official tivo service is once tivo left the UK market, development stopped and the provisioning of the guide service was just robotic and ridged. What ever data tribune gave tivo was what we got at a certain point in time and that was it. The community driven alternative epg provides the ability for us (the users) as a team to add value to the system through guide data enhancements etc, so it has the potential to be as good as we wish to make it!

Although some of these improvements might be minor, added together, I think they qualify as an overall improvement to the legacy system we have adopted