• Overview
• Titan TV Benefits
• Titan TV Drawbacks
• Creating Custom Titan Channel Lineups
• Configuring Titan TV Guide to Work With NextPVR
• Installing the NextTVPI Plugin
• Using Titan TV with NextPVR
• NextTVPI / Titan TV Matching Rules
• Watch For Items

NextTVPI.exe is a utility program designed by the NextPVR development community that allows you to schedule recordings in NEXTPVR from an external TV Guide source such as Titan TV (a website that provides a free customizable and versatile online TV Guide for North American viewers). Titan TV lists up to 2 weeks worth of channel programming. There are many advanced features in Titan's TV Guide and it's very intuitive to create your own channel lineups and groups. I won't go into detail as there is plenty of help on the Titan site but I would recommend learning how to create your own channel lineups. Also have a peek at the "daily view" feature which is a nice feature that displays all the shows playing for the next week on any selected channel giving you a side by side view of Mon vs Tues vs Wed, etc. There are many other nice features that can be seen by visiting the site and navigating around in the TV guide.

When you click on a show in Titan TV, you get the option to record the show by clicking on the red circle icon which will trigger downloading a tvpi file containing the information required by NextPVR to record the show. You can schedule the recording of future shows provided that your NextPVR channel lineup is configured to match your Titan TV lineup.

I actually already had a Titan lineup for several years prior to the creation of NextTVPI utility and have been using the Titan Guide since NextPVR version 4. Titan was a much better guide. NextPVR version 5's web based TV guide was a big improvement over version 4, but I still prefer the Titan Guide for its ease of use and convenient features. I used to find my shows in Titan guide and then if I wanted to record it, I'd find the matching entry in the NextPVR guide and schedule it from there. The NextTVPI utility makes it much easier, because now the show can be directly scheduled from the Titan guide saving me a lot of extra leg work.

Its like the marriage of two great products !

The best way to see the Titan TV benefits is to take a test drive, keeping in mind that if you like it, then you will ditch the default lineup and create your own customized lineup that matches your NextPVR lineup. To create and save you own "custom" lineups, you will need to become a member of Titan. Membership is free, doesn't ask for personal info (aside from your email address) and there is no software to install.

The Titan default lineup is for broadcast ATSC stations but you can create your own lineup that includes just about any cable or antenna station available in North America (excluding premium content channels such as PPV or VOD). Some of the benefits are:

• Great graphical interface
• Genre coloring of shows. Titan has 22 distinctly different colored genres. The bottom tv guide banner displays a legend of genres by color. When I look at my genre coloring in NextPVR all my movies are brown even though one is action, another comedy, etc.
• Genre filtering (e.g. just show me documentaries). NextPVR also does filtering but the way Titan TV displays the results is a bit nicer.
• Daily View feature. While viewing the guide, clicking on the channel logo of any station will switch from "guide view" to "daily view". Daily view displays all the shows playing on the selected station for each day of the week displaying the days in columns across the page (Mon, Tues, Wed, etc.). For example, if there is a as show on every day at 2 PM that interests you, you can see each episode for the week in the daily view (as well as all the shows on that channel).
• Easy to see a summary of what each show is about without having to actually click or hover on the show for details. This feature and the daily view features are what sold me on using Titan TV's guide because they make it so conveniently easy to browse for shows.

• Initial configuration and testing can be time consuming
• A bit clunky in the search feature to add new channels in the Titan lineup
• You have to manage your own scheduling conflicts as there is no way to tell in Titan if you've already recorded a show for the same time period (however you can see them in the pending recordings list in NextPVR)
• EPG listings are for North American channels only (including foreign channels that are in a North American lineup such as BBC World News or Russia Today). If you have channels outside North America then you need to use the NextPVR guide to schedule recordings.
• Cannot schedule recurring recordings from Titan (you will still need to do this in NextPVR). You can however easily schedule a 1 time recording and then go into the pending schedules in NextPVR and edit the entry to become a recurring recording.
• No premium content channels like PPV or VOD. Most of the North American movie channels can be added to the Titan guide lineup such as HBO, Starz, Showtime, etc.
• If you change providers or your provider changes their channel lineup then work will be required reconfigure and align the new lineup with Titan TV.

In order to create a custom lineup in Titan TV, you must first register as a member which is free, doesn't ask for personal info (aside from your email address) and there is no software to install. The purpose for membership is so you can create your own custom lineups and have them stored by Titan. Once you are a member you create custom lineups by clicking on the red suitcase icon on the top banner of their TV Guide. Hovering over that icon will display "Manage Lineups and Channels". It's easy but a bit time consuming to create your own lineup, follow the prompts on the screens and fall back on any tutorials if you have trouble, the site is very intuitive.

If you are using over the air ATSC channels then you may not need to create a custom lineup, try loading the Titan default guide according to your zipcode. If you have trouble scheduling recordings, then you may have to create a custom lineup in order to get the channel names to match.

When creating your very first lineup, Titan will give you options to create a lineup from your broadcasting area, from a cable provider, from a satellite provider, etc. Some of the options will ask for a zip code. It won't recognize Canadian postal codes, but if you live close enough to the US you can enter a zip code closest to you. In any event, it doesn't really matter as long as you can get a first lineup created. Try to find one that has most of the channels you already have setup in NextPVR. You will be editing this lineup in any event to customize it to match with NextPVR (deleting the channels that aren't in NextPVR from your custom lineup and adding other channels that are in NextPVR but not in your Titan default lineup). You can also create lineup groups (like Movies, Cable, Docs, Sports, News, Networks, etc) and there is a facility allowing you to move channels from 1 group to another.

When adding a channel in Titan, you can find almost any cable channel or broadcast station in North America (including Canadian channels). So if you live outside of the U.S. but watch North American stations, then pretend to be American and find a zip code that will get you the best default channel lineup and then edit that lineup to match with your NextPVR lineup.

Probably the quickest way to create your first lineup would be to choose a satellite or cable provider with the most channels matching your NextPVR lineup and then delete the channels you don't have in NextPVR and add back any that are missing in Titan. You can always change the channel type for any station to broadcast, cable, digital_cable etc so the initial lineup doesn't necessarily have to match with the type of provider or TV tuner you have. The important details are to ensure that the channel number and name (aka callsign) in Titan match the corresponding NextPVR channel setup.

Although time consuming to create your first lineups, the benefits of using Titan's TV Guide's features are worth it. It takes me about an hour to do 100 channels. Fortunately, out of hundreds of channels in North America, I only care about 100 of them and most of them I never watch (but still want to know what's on them just in case). One of the most time consuming parts of the initial setup is ensuring that the EPG listings for your Titan Channel match with the EPG listings in your NextPVR channel (i.e. that you paired the two channels together correctly). I've had trouble finding the right PBS for example. I thought I paired the right stations but the EPG schedule in Titan didn't match with NextPVR (Both were PBS stations but were displaying completely different shows for the same time period). I had to remove that PBS station from my Titan lineup and hunt down the correct matching PBS channel. I was able to find right station in Titan by searching for the station id WNED when adding a channel. If I have a really hard time finding the right channel in Titan, then using PBS as an example, I created a lineup group in Titan called test. I clear my test group of all channels and then I add all the variations of PBS channels I can find in Titan to my test lineup group. Then I go to the Titan Guide and load my test group and I get to see what's currently on each one of those channels allowing me to find the one that matches the schedule that my NextPVR PBS epg has. Titan gives you the ability to add channels from one lineup to another, so I used that feature to add the correct PBS channel from my test group lineup to my "real" Titan channel lineup.

When creating or editing your custom Titan TV channel lineup, you need to match each channel in Titan up with NextPVR by doing the following for each channel that you've added in your Titan TV lineup:

• Edit the channel number in Titan TV to match the channel number in NextPVR
• If you use major/minor in NextPVR then make sure major/minor in Titan TV also match (otherwise ensure they are zero)
• Edit the Titan TV Callsign to match with the first 10 characters of the NextPVR channel name

That's all there is to it. The bulk of the work is creating those first lineups. I've found the easiest way to do it is split-screen with the Titan window on the left and NextPVR Settings -> Channels on the right. If you click on the "wrench" icon in NextPVR channel settings, you can change the name of the station that displays in NextPVR. Once you are satisfied with the name in NextPVR then copy the text in the NextPVR channel name and paste it into the CALLSIGN field in your Titan channel configuration. If your NextPVR name is longer than 10 characters, don't worry the Titan CALLSIGN field will automatically truncate it to 10 characters.

You don't necessarily have to create every channel from NextPVR in Titan but rather just the ones that you actually watch and want to record shows from. There are a ton of channels that I never watch so I don't include them in my Titan lineup.

Unzip the contents of the NextTVPI package and copy the files to C:\Program Files\NextPVR (or to wherever your NextPVR application was installed). My Norton warned me that it did not know a lot about this program but I accepted it because the NextPVR forums are a source that I trust.

Download NextTVPI

See Change History for older versions

When browsing your custom TV guide in Titan TV, click on any show and then you have the option to record it by clicking on the red circle icon. Doing so will download a TVPI file to your browser's default download directory. You should configure explorer and your browser to open this file with C:\Program Files\NextPVR\NextTVPI.exe and from then on, anytime you record a show in the Titan TV Guide, a TVPI file will download and will be opened and imported by NextTVPI to schedule it to record in NextPVR (provided the matching criteria in the next section met).

You need to change Windows default app's settings to automatically open TVPI files by pointing them to C:\Program Files\NextPVR\NextTVPI.exe. The easiest way is to go into Titan and record a show so that it downloads a TVPI file. Then go into windows explorer, right click on the file and select "open with". You will most likely not see NextTVPI in the list of apps displayed, go to the bottom and click "choose another app" Then browse to find the NextTVPI.exe app in C:P\Program Files\NextPVR. Ensure you check the box for "Always use this app to open .tvpi files".

You can also do the same by changing the default apps associations in Windows Settings. Details can be found here or several other sources if you google for them:

• How to Change Windows Default App Settings

Details on how to automatically open a file in various browsers are listed below:

• How to Automatically Open a File in IE or Edge
• How to Automatically Open a File in Chrome
• How to Automatically Open a File in FireFox

When NextTVPI imports a TVPI file, it will only schedule the recording if one of the following matching rules are met:

• If the channel name is exact then it will be scheduled. This means if the first 10 characters of the NextPVR channel name match the Callsign name used in Titan TV's lineup.
• If not the above, then if the channel number matches and the title matches exactly it will be scheduled
• If not the above, then it checks for exact title and subtitle on the first channel it matches. If a match is found then it will be scheduled. The time must also match all three.
• If there is no guide data in NextPVR on the given channel, then the logic will revert to channel name matching only.

If a recording from Titan failed to schedule then its usually because the channel lineups between Titan and NextPVR have not been configured properly causing one of the above rules to be violated. You can check the NEXTPVR logs (look for the NextTVPI entries in the list of exported log files) which will provide more information about what did not match.

If you read the rules carefully, you will note that you don't necessarily have to configure all the channel numbers and channel name/callsigns to be the same but it works much better if you do because there are often slight differences in the naming of a show between Titan's epg and the one you've setup in NextPVR. If the channel numbers and channel names match, then you don't have to worry about any differences in the show title name. Its really a personal preference of how much initial configuration you want to do to avoid mismatches when scheduling recordings. I chose to do a lot of work up front and then just sit back and enjoy, so all my channel numbers and names match between Titan and NextPVR.

• You will notice that the TVPI files are using GMT times (aka UTC) but that doesn't affect anything since NextTVPI matches and schedules by using GMT time zone. Be sure you set your time zone correctly in the Titan TV preferences page. I am in EST time zone, so I set my Titan profile to "Eastern (-5 GMT)" Thus, I will see 5 hours difference between the time I see in the TVPI file versus the viewing time I see in the EPG listings.
• You are on your own when it comes to managing recording conflicts. There is no indication of overlapped scheduling in the Titan Guide. If you don't have the appropriate number of tuners to record multiple shows simultaneously, then you will need to check the Pending Recordings list in NextPVR to make sure you haven't scheduled any recording conflicts.

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