Missing Guide Data from Windows Media Center–Workaround
It appears that there is a widespread issue causing certain channels to have no guide data in Windows Media Center. The ball is pretty clearly in Microsoft’s court, but as far as I can tell there are no more players on team Media Center so I expect this one to take a while to fix.
Like me, many Canadians set up Media Center using a nearby US zip code to enable all of the high-definition TV features. Unfortunately it seems that the zip code closest to Toronto has been particularly hard hit by this bug.
I’ve updated my Media Center hack to help work around this issue by running a single batch file. Full updated instructions and zip file are located at the Windows Experts wiki here.
Essentially, this will supplement your buggy US listings with additional listings from Canadian cable and satellite providers. Canadian providers tend to carry lots of US stations as well, so this may also be a decent workaround for some of our friends to the south.
Early reports from users at Digital Home Canada indicate that this workaround has been successful for everyone who has implemented it.
Finally, I’ve logged the bug with Microsoft (click here). Please vote it up and mark “I can too” stating that you are able to reproduce the bug as well. This might help to speed up the official fix.
You are awesome Peter! Thanks!
Hello Peter, thank you for your hack. I tried it and there are a couple of things I wanted to point out. By the way, I used the custom option (#9) because I have an HDTV antenna.
1) In lines 111 and 112 of the CanGuide batch file, it says CANImportCustom instead of ImportCANCustom), Are these two typos?
2) Are the arguments at the end of ImportCANCustom.xml reversed? US CA in lines 46 and 54 respectively.
3) When using mc2xml.exe, I entered my Canadian zip code and the Antenna(TER) option, but that particular guide ID seems to be missing at least one channel (which by the way, is present when selecting the same options on the zap2it website).
4) In any case, I keep on getting an error from Schtasks saying that the XML is malformed (but it seems fine, all I changed was the guide ID using TextPad).
Needless to say, I am still missing some Canadian channels on my “US” WMC setup. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
The Custom batch file is still doesn’t work (I even tried again from scratch). But I used one of the other guides (for a random supplier in my city), and even thought it was kind of annoying to find my missing channels among 400+ channels, it worked. So, thank you!
Is there any possible solution for us Vista Media Center users? Thanks!
Sorry to post again, I tried creating a little script to get it to work on Vista based on your work with no luck, any suggestions?
%windir%\ehome\loadmxf -i MXF\RogersToronto.mxf
%windir%\system32\reg.exe ADD “HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\media center\service\EPG” /v country /t REG_SZ /d ca /f
%windir%\ehome\mcupdate.exe -ds !Loaders!Wmis!Subscriptions!28490385
%windir%/system32/reg.exe ADD “HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\media center\service\EPG” /v country /t REG_SZ /d us /f
Is the loadmxf and mcupdate the same Vista vs W7? Do you think those are the right registry changes for vmc? Thanks!