Wrong language in TV Guide (Finland) [SOLVED]

[herrakonna]

OK, so I just got my WMC PC set up, am in Finland, have the language set to English everywhere I can find anyplace to specify language (including the Windows OS) and overall, everything is working fine. I have a dual tuner DVB-T card that tunes fine and I can pull up the guide, but the names of all of the programs are in Swedish rather than Finnish (I can manage OK in Finnish but speak no Swedish).

I've spent now several hours searching through configuration screens and googling, but can't find anywhere any way to force the listing to be in Finnish.

On my TV, which is also connected to the same DVB-T feed as the WMC tuner cards, the guide shows the Finnish program names.

???

All I can think is that the TV is taking the names from the DVB-T signal itself whereas the WMC is taking them from the internet somewhere, and perhaps the English OS is causing it to prefer Swedish over Finnish.

Any suggestions? Is there a way to force WMC to take all program guide information from the DVB-T signal itself? Or how else can I force the Finnish guide instead of the Swedish?

Thanks.

[richard1980]

You can tell WMC to not download listings by going to Tasks > Settings > General > Automatic Download Options. Uncheck the box for "Automatically download Windows Media Center data between the following times:"

[herrakonna]

You can tell WMC to not download listings by going to Tasks > Settings > General > Automatic Download Options. Uncheck the box for "Automatically download Windows Media Center data between the following times:"

Will that then force it to take all of the guide data from the DVT-T broadcasts, or will that just leave me with an empty guide?

[richard1980]

I believe so, since the in-band guide service is not being disabled. But then again, I don't have any experience with the in-band guide, so I could be wrong.

[CyberSimian]

Will that then force it to take all of the guide data from the DVT-T broadcasts, or will that just leave me with an empty guide?

If the EPG is empty because you have not downloaded the EPG from the internet, Media Center will populate the EPG from the EPG broadcast with the TV programmes. However, it only does this when a tuner is actually active. This means that you need to view live TV, or record some TV programmes, in order for the EPG to be populated.

In the UK, the broadcast EPG is for 7 days only (compare with the 14 days of the downloaded EPG), and with the analogue switch off, it now seems that each MUX contains only the EPG for that particular MUX, and not for any of the other MUXes. Example: if my EPG is empty and I tune to the BBC MUX, the BBC channels in the EPG will be populated for the next 7 days, but none of the other channels will be populated (ITV, Channel 4, Five, and so on). The significance of this is that to ensure that the EPG is fully populated at all times, I would need to schedule some 15-minute recordings for overnight, one recording per MUX; then the following day I would have a full 7-day EPG for all channels (plus several uninteresting 15-minute recordings to be deleted without viewing). Of course, this may be different in Finland.

As to your existing problem, if you no longer download the EPG from the internet, as the days pass it will gradually reduce, until there is none of it left, at which point it will be replaced by the broadcast EPG. So after no more than 2 weeks you should have the EPG in Finnish.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[herrakonna]

Is there any way to flush out the old EPG data that was downloaded from the net, to force it being replaced with data taken from the broadcast signal?

[richard1980]

http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/09/clearing ... enter.html

Note this will clear everything...not just the guide, but tuner setup as well. So you'll have to go back through tuner setup, but I believe you can opt-out of the EPG download from Microsoft during setup.

[herrakonna]

Well, unfortunately this didn't help. I cleared the database, after disabling automatic updates, and opted out of downloading the guide data when reconfiguring the tuners, so it's taking its guide data from the broadcast, yet it is still selecting the Swedish version of the guide data. &#(%@*#&$(*#%

Looks like I may have to go with something like MythTV or SageTV or something...

[richard1980]

So obviously the in-band guide data (not Microsoft) is the source of the Swedish data. Try reversing it. Opt in to the Microsoft listings and disable the in-band guide loader service.

[herrakonna]

Nothing I tried, after a heated week of hacking, managed to fix the problem in WMC itself. But I did, fortunately, find a solution. DVBLink TVSource from DVBLogic fixed things nicely. I reconfigured the tuners using DVBLink and set up the EPG data to come via DVBLink from the broadcast signal, and all is now right with the universe.

It's a pity that Microsoft can't get their act together and provide configuration options to manually select the guide language when multiple local options exist, but I'm at least happy to have found a solution, albeit at a bit of extra expense for the third party software.

[omenatalo]

The solution on this forum worked for me:
http://experts.windows.com/frms/windows ... 86608.aspx

1. Open RegEdit and navigate to:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\MCE.GlobalSettings

2. Change systemLanguage to "fin"
3. Reboot your PC
4. Open an Administrator command prompt, run the following command and wait a few minutes.

%windir%\eHome\mcupdate -pscn 0

5. Start Media Center and open the Guide: all schedule data should now be in Finnish.