Considering the problems people have detailed on this forum for exporting program content to their computers this is
probably asking for the Moon, but here goes.
Can any of you clever folks give me some idea of the posibility of downloading or exporting the EPG to my computer, preferably without having to take the box
to bits every time?

If you just want an EPG on your PC it would be much easier to use an on-line EPG or something like DigiGuide.

Or is there another reason?

The reason I ask is that I find getting the schedules on my computer means that I can edit them so that I can get a personalised set of listings for all radio stations and TV channels for the day. This presents only my favourite programs and any new ones - cutting out all the 'junk' that fills the 24 hour listings. On-line listings only give a very narrow slice (short time, small number of channels) and I still need to wade through all the many programs I know I'm not interested in. Currently I do this using an analogue TV card to download teletext pages, but this will come to an end soon with the closing down of the analogue service. Actually, being able to export teletext pages to my computer would be an even better solution than downloading the EPG.

Digiguide does everything you need - two weeks listings at a minimum (some channels have 3 months worth), you can have automarkers which exclude stuff (e.g. for CSI NY I have NOT "Series 1" AND NOT "Series 2" AND NOT "Series 3", of for the Formula One F1 AND NOT "Highlights" which picks up some interesting documentaries at times). At one point I had a complex marker to try and highlight various shows of interest, e.g. showing programmes with word X mentioned, but not actress Y, or having phrase F,G,H but not phrases I,J,K, or Actor L. When I finished uni I zapped it though as it was no longer of interest.

You can have different types
e.g. Video and Watch - Video would be shown on screen and on print outs in one colour, with Watch in another (handy for setting timers).

Once you have tuned it a bit you can then print a personalised TV guide (with synopsis) to put on your coffee table.

Handley you reminded on screen with audio prompts - for example I missed the second part of the CSI/Without A Trace double bill and my PC read it out to me last night while I was watching a movie, allowing me to set my PVR to record it.

Thanks for the quick reply, Kev. I've taken a look at DigiGuide and where I can see that it will do some of the things I want it still seems a mite convoluted to what I'm used to. I get a very compact, concise set of listings which flag up only favourite programs and anything new - everything else is suppressed - this fits on a few screens and is very readable. It's also very easy to maintain, requiring only that you add the names of your favourite programs once to a file via cut-and-paste.
Other aspects of Digiguide put me off - like being tied to having a Broadband connection and sharing personal information with a commerical company who then possesses a marketing profile on you. Maybe I've just grown too fussy but I like my independence.

http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/6...giguidevt0.png shows what I look at most of the time, I have manually zapped a few repeats though (E4+1 mainly).

You don't need a broadband connection - I used to have the full NTL channel line up on it and use dial-up to download the data weekly (although as schedules change it can drift a bit). The smaller Freeview lineup would easily be doable over dialup (although ADSL would be preferable for first use).

I'm not sure how the new programmes would work, but then again with 30 channels on Freeview any method is going to be convoluted!

ISTR one bit of digital tv software I used downloaded the Freeview EPG over a period of 20 minutes, it was displayed in a list style format - no idea if it could export though.

Thanks for the screenshot of Digiguide. It looks as if they've got what I need for my favourites - but I will miss the ability to check out new programmes easily.
For instance there is occassionally a program on Radio7 I might be interested in -but 98% of them I'm not. If I have to read in the full schedule every day just to keep an eye on the 2% I'd be interested in I just wouldn't bother. The only way I could duplicate what i do now is if Digiguide were to supply schedules in simple text formats that are easily exported so that I could amend my search program and treat them as substitute teletext listings.

I beginning to suspect that a service like Digiguide is inevitable once analogue cuts out.

I knew I'd seen it before - If XML is any good to you, then ProgDVB can output a file similar to the one I've uploaded to http://www.kjs.me.uk/3rdparty/digitalspy/epg.xml (I limited to the first 4 channels for size reasons, was only on Mux D for a minute so may be incomplete)

Thanks for letting me see what ProgDVB can do, Kev. I've only had time to give it a quick look but it seems very promising, even if a requires little more work to glean the information than teletext files. I notice that ProgDVB also grabs digital teletext so I want to look into that first. Good stuff! http://images.digitalspy.co.uk/forum/smilies/smile.gif

As far as I can see it can't handle MHEG which is used for digital text in the UK - perhaps what you have seen is referring to the "analogue" style text carried on some European and satellite channels?

To get the info it's quite simply a case of
Load ProgDVB
Select BBC ONE
Click EPG
Wait a while (say 20 minutes) while it fully populates (should manage in five but errors can mean it takes a while to fully fill all the gaps)
Click Export
Click Save and enter a file name
Click Exit
Click X

Something AutoIT could cope with quite easily. Obviously not quite as easy as grabbing some plain text I guess.

Dusted off my old TV PCI card and reinstalled it but couldn't get ProgDVB to work - probably due to my vintage computer. So I fell back on using the EPG on the TV card and managed to
get nearly all the listings I wanted from that instead. I now get favourites in a compact file and am waiting for the downloaded archives to fill up to get the new programmes in
like format.
Still feel a bit disappointed that I couldn't get the EPG from the Digihome, for a number of reasons - not least that compared to my venerable old computer it's an immaculate piece of kit.
Teletext would have been great too.