PromaSoft EPGcenter
  EPG Software for Windows

The XMLTV Organizer Input location provides a graphical user interface on top of the XMLTV.EXE application. To make EPGcenter ready for this type of location you only need to install the XMLTV Integration Package

There is no need to know anything on how to install/configure or run XMLTV.EXE

EPGcenter provides increased performance compared to natively using XMLTV.EXE. The speed increase can be as much as 10 times.

You can use the graphical user interface to manage your channels

It all starts by creating a new XMLTV Organizer input location (as many as you want)

Click the Input Tab

Right click on the grid and select Add New Location

Description - Here you can enter whatever you want. For this example we will name it Sky UK

Active - We want this input location to be active so we leave the active checkbox checked. Inactive input locations will not be consider by EPGcenter

Input Type - Here select XMLTV Organizer

Select Country - Here select the country you are interested in. For this example we will select UK Radio Times but ofcourse you are free to choose whatever you want.

Select Channels - Now select the channels you are interested in and click Save

Retrieve Program Description - We want the more detailed description of the programs so we will select the Retrieve Program Description option

Days - Here select the number of days of program information you want. In our example we will select 3 days

Channels/Thread - This option is here to increase the performance drastically by splitting the download in several download jobs. A good setting would be 10. The lower you set this figure the higher the performance increase will be. Do not set this setting to low as this will start too many download jobs at once

Offset in hours - The UK is one hour begin on our time (can be different for you) so we need to set this to 1

Click Save

This concludes setting up an XMLTV Organizer location. You can define as many XMLTV Organizer location as you want.

Once you've defined the input location, all that's left to do is to retrieve the EPG data. You can do that in different ways

Manually - to manually retrieve the EPG data press F6 or select File/Reload EPG

Automated - You can also tell EPGcenter to download all EPG data at a certain time of day. For that click the Options Tab, select the Load EPG Data at option and enter a time of day. In this example EPGcenter will download EPG data at 03AM

* Always keep in mind that EPGcenter has it's own cache. If you have downloaded EPG information from a certain location like one hour ago, EPGcenter will not download that information again unless you have cleared the cache with the File/Clear Cache option. Editing an input location will also delete the cache entries for that input location.

Now you can view the EPG data or upload it (manually or automated) to your favorite PVR or Satellite receiver. Click here for more details on that.

Finally this is how a Stress Test would look like. EPGcenter is busy extracting 3 days worth of EPG data of over 800 channels, running 4 threads at the same time. You can see that EPGcenter is loadbalacing the downloads over 4 different sites.