“After struggling with EPG files for a long time, we decided to make the world better…”
We found out there were EPG files that contain complete country EPG guides like the GitHub EPG project or similar programs and websites. So at first, we wanted to make an international TV Guide of 195 countries, all TV channels of all over the world. One central TV guide that has everything. It would have been great! Who knows one day we’ll still get to it…
But after testing and trying multiple ways to get good EPG files, we found out all or most of them are crap. For some reason the time was wrong, the info was wrong or just empty. (by the way for the moment even our own files are still crappy! We are ‘evolving’ to perfect files over time).
By joining the EPG community and starting to know people, websites, programs, writing configs, correcting configs, we really started to get the hang of it…
At a certain point the GitHub files site went down (not because of the files but because of the processing power it requires) and discussion started for an alternative solution, but this took weeks without any real good outcome… So having no good solution we started this website as an alternative. First with just a couple of files and crappy configs, but at least it was working.
After a lot of work, ideas and devotion we are already at the level we are today, with some more brilliant ideas coming… (already invented in our brains, just needs a lot of programming)
When we first started this site we only had 1 mission: Provide perfectly maintained EPG guides of the highest possible quality and totally for FREE!
Not long after, several problems started to show up…. Some TV Player programs or devices only supported a single XML file to be loaded when most people need to combine different files to have all channels. In a lot of files there are the same channel names as in other ones, making it hard to find out which one is the correct one. All together all these files take a long time to be processed by most TV Players, or they may even crash…
People on slow internet connections or limited bandwidth experience long downloaded times with high data volumes… and so on… At that point we decided to create the 1st version of the Crazy EPG application.
It would let you choose which countries you needed, and afterwards for those countries which channels you needed, to finally generate you a small, fast and compact guide.xml file which was exactly what you needed.
But a lot of people got stuck at this point as well…. what to do with this generated file which is on my local computer and not on some link I can point my devices to? Also these files got generated from the free 2 days TV Guides meaning you had to generate a new file every 2 days manually to keep having a TV Guide.
So we wanted to solve that problem…
After weeks of programming we came up with Crazy EPG 0.8 “NextGen” version (summer 2023), which offered the possibility to upload your chosen config to our servers, where we would daily generate the file for you, and provide it to you on an easy accessible internet link. ALL FOR FREE!!
(In march 2024 we migrated from our Windows .NET application to a FULL WEB version, so we could solve the problem of only Windows users being able to use our software…)
We first wanted to only provide this ‘special’ service for donating users, but that would be unfair to a lot of people worldwide who cannot afford to donate any money, and as we are a non-profit organization, we just wanted to share this with everybody FOR FREE! For those who do want to give us a donation, we move their configuration file to our high speed priority queue, so they can be 100% sure the file gets generated each day around the same time + they can select 500 channels instead of 200 like the FREE users + we give them access to our 7 days of EPG files which are selected in a super-intelligent pattern.
Our original 7-days EPG files are cut up into files that include 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, and so on… For all non-donating users and our public EPG links on our website, we only provide the files with 2 days of guide.
For our donating users, we carefully select THE BEST file. Which could be any file actually…
Let’s say for non-donating users a TV guide has been broken for 2 days. They will have an empty EPG guide for these TV Channels. For our donating customers we can’t use our 7-days file anymore, but we still have a 5-days file which is perfect for the next 5 days. Our intelligent file chooser chooses which file has the longest possible TV Guide and assembles your personal EPG file/link with that chosen file…. isn’t that amazing!
Know that each donation will activate the account for the next 31 days, so choose a recurring donation to stay active all year round… but if you just want to test it for 1 month, you could choose just a single donation to give it a try…
As we feel guilty for asking donations, we decided ANY donation will unlock access to these files, even the lowest possible donation. Again, we do this knowing not all people in the world can afford to pay 4 or 5 euros each month, so ANY amount will do… But please, for those who CAN afford it, help us keeping this service up and running, and help us to make money to invest in new and better stuff we come up with….
If you’re going to donate: first make sure you are a FREE and non-donating known user in our Crazy EPG Web application. Afterwards start a (monthly) donation so we process the donation AFTER your user registration is completed! Make sure to use the same email address! By the way: you can also do a single donation which will unlock the same files, but only for the next month (and will disable automatically afterwards back to 2 days of guide).
It’s no use to register for 1 month, make a 500 channel config and stop donating afterwards. When the donation time ends automatically only the first 200 channels will only get processed… sorry! One day when we have enough funding we will remove the download limit and channel limit.