14 DAY TRIAL // If you are addicted to some TV shows or to TV in general you will most certainly find Maxemum TV Guide a very useful application. It can do a very nice listing of the programs, it has a search function and, more importantly, a reminder.
The downside of this program is that it doesn't install that easy. It is based on QT and uses XMLTV as its backend to grab listings. XMLTV is somehow a standard when it comes to TV listings. In my opinion it supports a fair enough number of countries. Maxemum tries to explain all this things but I think that is a little too complicated to get things running, mostly because of XMLTV. Another issue is that you might encounter difficulties to retrieve TV listings for some countries if the links program uses change. For example, at this moment, XMLTV has broken links for Romania and this makes the program useless to those who live in this country.
What can Maxemum TV-Guide do for me?
It can display TV listings and arrange them by some criteria you set. In the right part of the program are displayed all the channels from your country. Most certainly you like only some of them. In this list you can select the channels you watch and in the left pane of the program are displayed shows, grouped default by the time. From here you can sort by Show, Duration and Channel. In this list it is displayed the time when the show starts, the name of the show, the duration and the channel. This can be easily rearranged with drag and drop. Shows that already started are displayed on an orange background and for each one there is a progress bar that tells you how much of a show consumed.
The lame programs can be easily blocked and the cool ones can be added to favorites. The advantage of blocking a program is that it isn't listed anymore. Adding programs to favorites makes them highlighted in the color you choose from settings. A couple of minutes before one of your favorite shows starts, a pop-up box is fired and reminds you to watch it. You can also configure the alarm to execute a command. Could be easily configured to start the TV Tunner application. This is one of the best features of the program. Even though you could easily add events in Koraganizer for this type of functionality, with Maxemum TV-Guide is much easier and you also have listings of other programs.
An interesting feature of the program is the search for additional information regarding a show. Unfortunately this didn't work for Italy. I suspect that is the fault of the links in XMLTV. Maybe some day this backend will really provide us a trustworthy standard. Until then I'll rely on the information provided by Internet websites.
Right clicking the main window displays options to view only shows from that day, spanned on several days, only favorite shows and also a search view. The search tool really comes in handy sometimes. For the additional infos I was talking about earlier you can also search in the description. The Good
I like that I can easily choose between different listing views, that I can add favorites that alert me and I can easily search a show.
The Bad
I wasn't able to get listings for Romania at this moment. Install can be tricky and when I consider that the program shows TV listings, maybe it just isn't worth the bother. I suspect that detailed information about shows is rarely displayed.
The Truth
The truth is that this software is not exactly there. Not necessary because of it, but also because of the functionality of XMLTV. It's still room for development both in the area of XMLTV and Maxemum TV-Guide. The bottom line is that for people addicted to television this program can really be useful, but for others that watch TV occasionally a web guide does the trick just fine.
