The Green Button - New QuickGuide Beta

The Green Button - New QuickGuide Beta: OK - here's the deal. After installing a new TV-tuner that should enable us to watch digital tv I've been fiddling around with a number of different small utilities to make our Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) in Media Center actually show listings for the various TV channels that we can receive.

After installing the TV tuner we got all the channels I hoped for. However for some reason Microsoft has decided that we can only receive 3 digital channels (only Danish). We have an additional 6 Swedish channels to chose from as well. Media Center, being as user friendly as it really is, does not give me the option to chose where I want to download EPG data from (this would probably confuse some users), and for some bizarre reason also applies its own format to the data instead of following the standard XMLTV format (but then again that's Microsoft for you). This is a know issue (especially for us living outside the U.S) and there are numerous post in various forums about this.

I've now tried various grabbers to get the data down and they all work fairly seamlessly. Another issue entirely is to actually get data from the XML file into Media Center. Enter QuickGuide. I found that this works rather well (although file tweaking, batch file writing, and XML editing was involved). But following the instructions given in the link in the title made it work. And now I have all the EPG data I wished for.

Now only one (or maybe a couple) question(s) remains: Why can't Microsoft make it so that normal users (like me until 2 weeks ago) can just set it up as it is now, but leave it to the "pros" to decide for themselves (hide the option well in the back of the Settings menu)? And why don't they use standard XMLTV? And why don't they just use the EPG data actually transmitted with the digital TV signal (during my nights searching for a solutions for this I found that they plan on this sometime in 2007 - I hope that is so!).