Tales From The Geek Side

Today I setup a trial account with Schedules Direct and configured my MythTV backend to use my lineups from Schedules Direct.  It went very smoothly.  The steps were:

• Create an account with Schedules Direct.  They offer free 1 week trials.  After a few days I’ll pay for 3 months.
• Update backend to latest from debian-multimedia.org
• Run mythtv-setup to change channel lineup source
• Run mythfilldatabase to grab listing information
• Test

Note that I did not have to update my myth frontends!
I had no hiccups at all along the way.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a nice simple interface for creating and managing lineups at schedules direct.  The only thing I’d like to see is a way to change the names of lineups.  I have an HD tuner card and an analog tuner card.  I like having a digital lineup and an analog lineup — both lineups are broadcasts.  To do this I have to use two different zip codes.  The result is that the names of the lineups are almost identical though the zip code is added to the name.  However, in mythtv-setup I can’t SEE the zip code (it’s truncated).  That makes setting the lineups a guessing game.