Media Center EPG: Rovi Guide Data Quality

Global guide related discussion. All Windows versions.
n4mwd

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#61

Post by n4mwd » Sun Aug 09, 2015 12:15 pm

I remember ONTV. The station was interesting because it broadcasted all religious programs in the daytime (unscrambled) and all porn (scrambled) at night. Nevertheless, I personally believe that OTA frequencies belong to the public and not to the station. Their broadcasts should not be allowed to be scrambled IMHO.

I used the GuideTool program as was recommended. It is difficult to beat. I was easily able to modify the guide database and select the EPG source for each channel - and I could do it remotely with ease. That is, I run GuideTool on my laptop to modify the guide data on the MediaCenter HTPC which is a different machine. This is very handy because outside of the Media Center program, the Windows text is hard to read. But its easy to read on the laptop sitting right in front of me.

Regarding the tuners, I only have one. Its a FusionHDTV5USB. I've bought others, but they were deaf for the most part. The Fusion is still not nearly as good as the tuner inside the TV, but its the closest thing I've found so far. I'd love to have multiple tuners and be able to dedicate certain tuners for certain channels.

Going a little off topic, I have concluded that the deafness problem with the USB tuners is not signal strength, but rather, RFI interference from a variety of sources. The reason I say this is because in some cases, a simple wire hanging out of the tuner connector does better than a multi-element outdoor antenna. With old analog, it was trivial to recognize RFI because when you were watching the news and all of a sudden you hear "Breaker breaker 19", but its not so easy with ATSC.

That said, I suspect that the built in TV tuners have better RFI filtering that many of the USB tuners lack.

Fatman

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#62

Post by Fatman » Mon Aug 10, 2015 11:36 pm

"Through The Decades" is broadcast in the Milwaukee Wi area, OTA. It has a generic description and records the same episode 4 times a day.

n4mwd

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#63

Post by n4mwd » Mon Aug 10, 2015 11:51 pm

I've seen the same problem with MeTV. All of a sudden, I'm getting generic descriptions and Media Center can't tell them apart. Most channels have proper descriptions, but some don't. I used GuideTool to got the missing channels, but some of them came with these generic descriptions. On the OTA EPG on the TV, the description is blank. But this all worked perfectly before the switch to Rovi.

adam1991

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#64

Post by adam1991 » Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:45 pm

I'd like to contact Rovi directly about guide quality issues. (I have posted feedback to Microsoft already.) I see a mention elsewhere that someone contacted Rovi via Twitter, and got a positive response from that interaction.

I'm not on Twitter, and won't be. Is there another way to contact Rovi?

Mike88

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#65

Post by Mike88 » Tue Aug 11, 2015 8:35 pm

This Rovi website has been mentioned & I did what this person did in message #483.
http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=6#p92066
I did get a reply back which said they were working with Microsoft on the issues.

The reply came back from this email which I also saw posted somewhere.
ipgcustomersupport@rovicorp.com

I have since then emailed Rovi with additional information about my issues in hopes that would help them.

Mike_TV

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#66

Post by Mike_TV » Wed Aug 12, 2015 6:33 pm

OTA HDTV user. Since the switch over to Rovi for the guide listings, I have several series that no longer have episode specific information, like the guests appearing on late night talk shows, and instead have a generic description of the series for each episode. For example...

The Tonight Show Staring Jimmy Fallon airing tonight 8/12/15. The episode description should be...

Ben Kingsley; Henry Cavill. Also: Reba McEntire performs.

Instead, this is how WMC displays the episode description...

The former "Late Night" host presides over a talk show featuring guests and music performances. Fallon succeeded Jay Leno as host of this venerable talker in February 2014.

This happens on a several different series. All of them have generic info.

The Tonight Show Staring Jimmy Fallon
Jimmy Kimmel Live
Late Night with Seth Meyers
The Late Late Show
The Chew
20/20
60 Minutes
Independant Lens
America's Test Kitchen

Any idea on when/if this is going to get fixed?

I'll add that if these are the official sources of the guide data to "cross check" that unique episode data is showing up correctly here...

http://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/tv-listings

[Moderator note: topic merged; search before posting]

poit57

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#67

Post by poit57 » Wed Aug 12, 2015 6:51 pm

I've noticed this on the late night talk shows since the switchover from Zap2it to Rovi. I normally check the guide to see the guests in order to determine if I care to tune in (or record) on any given night. I think it is just a matter of the Rovi service having less detail than Zap2it. I don't know if there is a discrepancy between the information each guide service receives from the source or Rovi just not doing a thorough job of adding that information to their guide.

RyC

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#68

Post by RyC » Wed Aug 12, 2015 7:50 pm

I posted a Connect issue about this exactly. If you run ObjectStoreRecovery task, WMC will actually pull the updated guide listing for these shows (Ben Kingsley; Henry Cavill. Also: Reba McEntire performs, instead of the generic The former "Late Night " host...). However, the listings for the next week will never get updated through a regular update, even when reflected on TVGuide.com. Running ObjectStoreRecoveryTask regularly is not practical, of course.

Space

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#69

Post by Space » Wed Aug 12, 2015 10:59 pm

The fact that the episode specific details exist on msn.com and are not on WMC seems to indicate that there is a problem with the updating of existing data once it is initially downloaded. It's also possible that the update is made in the Rovi server too late for it to get propagated to WMC before the airing.

Check msn.com every day and see when the episode specific data for the talk shows gets loaded. If it is only a day before the airing, then it may be to late to show up in WMC, if its more than 2 days before, then there may be something wrong with updating existing programs on the server that generates the WMC data from the Rovi data.

Mike88

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#70

Post by Mike88 » Wed Aug 12, 2015 11:10 pm

I use OTA and when I first switched to Rovi on 7-20-2015 (had to do a TV Signal setup) I set up a new weekday series recording. The first 2 recordings had the title, original air date & description. But since then they have only a generic description.

An older existing Sunday series recording did have all the guide data for it's first Rovi recording on 7-26-2015, but only a generic description for Sunday 8-2-2015 and Sunday 8-9-2015. However for Sunday 8-16-2015 it shows a full description again.

It appears Rovi is capable of getting & providing all the data but it's not happening all the time.

hansolo89

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#71

Post by hansolo89 » Wed Aug 12, 2015 11:16 pm

Mike_TV wrote:OTA HDTV user. Since the switch over to Rovi for the guide listings, I have several series that no longer have episode specific information, like the guests appearing on late night talk shows, and instead have a generic description of the series for each episode. For example...

The Tonight Show Staring Jimmy Fallon airing tonight 8/12/15. The episode description should be...

Ben Kingsley; Henry Cavill. Also: Reba McEntire performs.

Instead, this is how WMC displays the episode description...

The former "Late Night" host presides over a talk show featuring guests and music performances. Fallon succeeded Jay Leno as host of this venerable talker in February 2014.

This happens on a several different series. All of them have generic info.

The Tonight Show Staring Jimmy Fallon
Jimmy Kimmel Live
Late Night with Seth Meyers
The Late Late Show
The Chew
20/20
60 Minutes
Independant Lens
America's Test Kitchen

Any idea on when/if this is going to get fixed?

I'll add that if these are the official sources of the guide data to "cross check" that unique episode data is showing up correctly here...

http://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/tv-listings

[Moderator note: topic merged; search before posting]
Rovi emailed 2 weeks ago stating this was fixed, but its NOT fixed, sometimes i get a few days with guest lists and air dates, but it then reverts back to generic descriptions, so i don't think it will be fixed consistently since barely anyone monitors ms feedback site

RyC

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#72

Post by RyC » Wed Aug 12, 2015 11:24 pm

Email them back and say it's still not fixed :P

I created a connect issue but it seems like you need to hammer them in multiple places before they fix it

adam1991

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#73

Post by adam1991 » Thu Aug 13, 2015 12:00 am

IT'S FIXED!

The "generic info only" problem started 8/1 for me (OTA). Not every channel/program, but enough. The last couple of days I "spammed" the MS feedback listings, commenting on every related feedback item that was posted. I also found the contact form for Rovi, and just spelled it out for them yesterday. Rovi's TotalTV web site had everything correct, but the WMC guide contained none of that information.

And tonight, the broken listings appear to be fixed.

n4mwd

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#74

Post by n4mwd » Thu Aug 13, 2015 12:23 am

More channel listings are working now, but not all. MeTV seems to be working, but Laff TV is still generic. I guess they are working on it.

Space

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#75

Post by Space » Thu Aug 13, 2015 12:55 am

n4mwd wrote:More channel listings are working now, but not all. MeTV seems to be working, but Laff TV is still generic. I guess they are working on it.
Not for me, both MeTV and Laff are using mostly generic series descriptions. MeTV had appeared to be "fixed" for a while, but then reverted back to generic descriptions.

Laff is pretty much broken except for a few episodes (about 7 for the entire 12 days of data) that have episode specific details.

Mike88

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#76

Post by Mike88 » Thu Aug 13, 2015 1:13 am

I just checked about 10 programs on MeTV and MeToo and they all had generic descriptions.

I just sent Rovi another email.

hansolo89

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#77

Post by hansolo89 » Thu Aug 13, 2015 4:17 am

regarding generic descriptions on talk shows, every new setup fixes it temporary, but once it downloads data it never refreshes and defaults to generic descriptions

I can manually delete the db file in programdata folder and force a new setup and get good description for a few days, so its a bug, the data is there but never updates properly

mech259

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#78

Post by mech259 » Thu Aug 13, 2015 12:18 pm

[quote="SugarFree"]Have finally been contacted by a real person at Rovi, who asked for specific Guide Information problems. This is what I've sent her, and she's promised to get the right people to look into it.

What web address did you use to contact ROVI? Tried several zip codes and none work

n4mwd

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#79

Post by n4mwd » Thu Aug 13, 2015 12:29 pm

For the time being, I have real descriptions on all of MeTV, none on Laff. I haven't tried doing an update, and maybe I shouldn't if that will break things. The only thing I did that might be different is that I set my system parameters under windows to not wake the box to do the EPG update.

Also, I set all the channels with Guide Tool to use "Digital Terrestrial Lineup" instead of "OTA Antenna". I don't think the latter has anything to do with it, but maybe it does.

Space

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#80

Post by Space » Thu Aug 13, 2015 9:11 pm

n4mwd wrote:For the time being, I have real descriptions on all of MeTV, none on Laff. I haven't tried doing an update, and maybe I shouldn't if that will break things. The only thing I did that might be different is that I set my system parameters under windows to not wake the box to do the EPG update.

Also, I set all the channels with Guide Tool to use "Digital Terrestrial Lineup" instead of "OTA Antenna". I don't think the latter has anything to do with it, but maybe it does.
I don't think you are much different from most people. They fixed the issue and were sending unique episode descriptions for MeTV for guide data up to August 17th @ 9am EDT, then something broke again and there are just generic series descriptions from then onward. Hopefully they will fix it again.

If I look on msn.com, I see that some of the episodes do have descriptions after 8/17, so it seems that the source data does have the info, it is just not loading in to WMC anymore.

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