Windows 7 Media Center Not Downloading EPG listing

Question

I have virtually no EPG listings in WMC 7 I have tried rescan the TV Signals, deleted the epg listings directory, run the Object Store Recovery Task I've run MC Update and I've tried turning off the firewalls. The file downloads successfully according
the the Microsoft Event Viewer but the guide is empty except for a few channels that show the current program and the next one.
 All I've succeeded in doing is wasting hours of my time, loosing the UK HD channels that WMC 7 ignores and loosing the favourite channels.
Thanks for this Microsoft

Answer 1

Ok a few people have asked for some simple steps to get EPG Collector working to get the EPG in WMC working, I've laid it out in step by step instructions, should take a couple of hours to do;
EPG Collector Setup – UK Freesat
Download EPG Collector, your first port of call is the sourceforge home and download the latest version (4.0), if your using windows 8 (like me) you will also need to download the fixpak;
http://sourceforge.net/projects/epgcollector/files/V4.0/
Unpack and install EPG Collector, if you are applying the fixpack unzip it and copy and paste the contents of the zip folder into the EPG collector install folder, which typically can be found at; C:\Program Files (x86)\Geekzone\EPG Collector
Run the application by clicking (depending on what version of windows you have) Start -> All Programs -> EPG Collector -> EPG Center
Click File -> Create Collection Parameters
Click UK – FreeSat, then ‘OK’
On the tuning tab I left the default selected ‘Use any available tuner’, if you have a combination of different tuners, you may need to just select the freesat tuners, otherwise just leave the settings on this tab alone.
Select the output tab and select ‘Import the data to windows media center directly’, and the ‘flag all programmes as part of a series’, do NOT select ‘automatically map EPG data to channels’ which sounds useful but from what I’ve heard really isn’t and
messes up the channel lineup.
Select the ‘lookups’ tab and select ‘Movie lookup’ and ‘tv series lookup’
Select the ‘advanced’ tab and select ‘use freeset Huffman tables’
Select File -> Save, I saved my config as ‘EPG Collector’, which made sense to me.
Select Run -> Collect EPG Data, you should now see it doing ‘stuff’, it takes about 10 minutes or so, I guess depending on your setup, when it’s finished if it didn’t have any problems it will say  something to the effect of exiting with code
0, which sounds bad but it means it worked basically.
Assuming you didn’t experiment with letting it map the EPG data to the channels (I don’t recommend it) you now need to go into Media Center and re map the listings, it probably will absorb a couple of hours, these steps are for WMC 8, but 7 should be
the same, and I would assume Vista, load the program guide, right click on the channel on the left and click ‘Edit Channel’
Click ‘Edit Listings’ and select from the list the appropriate channel where it is followed by ‘-EPG Collector’ for example ‘BBC 1 London-EPG Collector’, one tip is that, at least in WMC 8 tapping the first letter of the channel jumps through the list,
e.g. tapping ‘b’ if your looking for bbc listings, saves a lot of time, nearly all the channels are there.
Click Save, and Save again and voila you should have the guide data for that channel, repeat this task for the other channels and your sorted.
Every time the EPG Collector runs it will update the EPG in WMC and you won’t have to fiddle with that mapping again, the next task is of course to automate running EPG collector so you don’t have to remember to run it yourself, I haven’t figured out the
‘easy’ steps for this part yet, so in the meantime just run the program each day to keep the data topped up.
John Braham, Analyst Programmer