MediaPortal Wiki 
Electronic Program Guides
How the Electronic Program Guide works
An Electronic Program Guide (EPG) is an overview of the television programs and showing times for each of your television channels. The listings are stored in a database and MediaPortal uses this information to display whats is on at a certain date/time, schedule recordings, label those recordings, etc.
The EPG consists of information about each program that will be shown. This includes base information such as:
- Title
- Start and end date/time
- Description
Extra information sometimes available:
- Genre
- Director
- Actors
- Repeat / First run
The amount of information available depends on the source of the information, and on the application used to retrieve the data. Not all sources provide all data, or in a usable form.
EPG Sources
DVB
The DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) system has the ability to transmit EPG data with each channel, in most cases this is for the coming 48 hours. Not all DVB systems include EPG data, so you will need to check with your provider if this is available to you. MediaPortal has built in support for getting the EPG data form the DVB stream.
Internet
Many sites provide a human readable and searchable TV guide on the internet, in most cases for the coming week or even two weeks ahead. Most providers have an online guide for their stations and sometime other stations as well. Also the web sites of newspapers often contain a TV guide.
There are many programs available that download these guide and format the data so that it can be imported into MediaPortal. For the storage of program information, MediaPortal uses the file format created by XMLTV. XMLTV is one of the first popular applications to retrieve program information from the internet.
MediaPortal is provided with a system for getting EPG data from the internet called WebEPG, but we also provide a list of alternatives (by no means complete).
NexTView
NexTView EPG data is transmitted as part of the analog TV signal, mostly in Germany, Austria, France and Switzerland. This data can be decoded with a program called nxtvepg (nexTView EPG Decoder Software). nxtvepg also provides a list of supported channels and providers.