As the only remaining active member of the accessDTV volunteer development team, I've created this page to contain information about the accessDTV product that is not available at the official accessDTV site. This will include information that may be missing in the release notes and additional useful helper applications that work with accessDTV. Due to NDA agreements, I am not able to host the accessDTV drivers and application install here. To get those, go to the accessDTV downloads page.

ADTV_EPG - Download Guide Data From SchedulesDirect
Over the years, accessDTV has obtained guide data from several sources. At one point, before I even owned an accessDTV card, iTech (the company behind accessDTV) offered data directly to their users for a fee. Once the volunteer development team took over, one of our primary goals was to once again populate the program guide. We went with a customized data feed from the Evolve Solutions GuideRemote service, which cost $10 per year. After a year or so, Evolve Solutions shut down this feed for various reasons and we were once again without data. A short time later, I found that we could make use of the free Data Direct service from Zap2it.com. This service worked very well for us for a few years and gave us excellent data. Unfortunately, Tribune decided to shut down the Data Direct service at about the start of the Fall 2007 TV season on the first of September.

Enter Schedules Direct. A group of representitives from some of the larger open source / freeware groups, including MythTV, who had relied on the feed from Data Direct have worked out an agreement with Tribune to host the same data that had been offered through the Data Direct service for a reasonable fee, which is currently $20 per year. I have worked out permission with Schedules Direct and Tribune to offer a program that will download guide data from Schedules Direct and populate a guide database that the accessDTV application software can use to display guide data and schedule recordings.

To use the ADTV_EPG application follow these steps:

1. Download the ADTV_EPG zip file and extract the contents into your main accessDTV folder (usually C:\Program Files\accessDTV, Inc\accessDTV).
2. Edit EpgProviders.ini in the main accessDTV folder, adding the following:
   Provider1Name=Schedules Direct
   Provider1Signup=http://www.schedulesdirect.org
   Provider1Help=SchedulesDirect.htm
   Provider1Config=%ADTVDIR%\IniEditSchedulesDirect.hta
3. Make sure that the NumProviders entry reflects the number of providers listed in EpgProviders.ini (should normally be 2)
4. Now launch the accessDTV application and open the Setup dialog
5. From the accessDTV Setup dialog, select the Providers tab, select Schedules Direct in the Available Providers list, and click the Configure button
6. In the ADTV_EPG configuration program, enter the username and password you obtained when you setup your Schedules Direct account and click the Save Login to Registry button
7. Back in the accessDTV Setup dialog, go to the Connection tab and select "automatically connect to server starting at" if you wish the guide to update daily. Also configure a time when your computer is expected to be on.
8. Make sure you check "Run Automatic Program Searches" if you want accessDTV to automatically record programs you have configured searches for.

BeyondTV Plugin for accessDTV Users
If you use both accessDTV and BeyondTV, I've written a plugin for BeyondTV that will monitor what BeyondTV is recording and generate accessDTV compatible metadata files. This will allow you to watch recordings made by BeyondTV as though accessDTV had recorded them. Keep in mind that this will only work for high definition transport streams - any other recordings made by BeyondTV will be ignored. To use the plugin, download the zip file and put the 2 files into the location of your choice - if using the default accessDTV installation folder, C:\Program Files\accessDTV, Inc\accessDTV is a good location. Then make sure that adtvBeyondTVMonitor.exe gets run during your system startup. When run, a new icon will appear in your system tray (4 green boxes in a diamond pattern). To change the configuration or to see what it's doing, double click on the icon. The default extension for the accessDTV metadata files is .adtv - until I release the next version of the accessDTV software, you'll need to change this to .xml (then click the Save button).