Setting Up a Local Tv Guide Denver Without Losing Your Mind
Most people trying to get a local TV guide working in the Denver area run into the same problems within the first hour. The data sources are fragmented, the XMLTV configurations rarely match what your software expects, and the antenna signal maps don't always align with what you're actually picking up. I've been wrestling with this setup since 2018 across multiple platforms, and here's what actually works. Local Tv Guide Denver is a regional electronic program guide tailored to the Denver-Fort Collins television market. It pulls data from over-the-air broadcasts and cross-references it with online scheduling information to give you a working guide for the stations in your area. The key stations you'll see covered are KMGH, KCOW, KUSA, KDVR, KCNC, and the public TV stations like KDEN and KGNU. The tricky part is that no single source gives you complete data. The broadcast EPG from your tuner only covers a few days and often drops programs during live events. The online databases fill in the gaps but aren't always synced to your local time zone correctly, which means your guide will drift by an hour if you don't catch it.
How to Get It Working Properly
Start with your OTA tuner and pull the channel list. Run a proper scan rather than a quick auto-scan because the Denver market has a lot of subchannels that fast scans skip entirely. You'll pick up stations like 5.2 on the digital edge that a quick scan just throws away. I spent three days troubleshooting missing guide data before I realized my initial scan had only found 28 channels instead of the 47 that were actually available. Once you have your full channel roster, you need an XMLTV source. The most reliable ones for this market are the OpenEIT feed and the Schedule Direct service. Schedule Direct costs money but it's worth it because they maintain their own crawler specifically for the US market and update every six hours. OpenEIT is free but the data completeness for Denver stations hovers around 78 percent, meaning roughly one in four programs will have no description or start time. Map your channel numbers to the XMLTV IDs correctly. This is where most people fail. Your tuner might label a station as "KMGH-DT" but the XMLTV source calls it "KMGH.denver". Run a test import with a small batch first. Check that at least 90 percent of the channels resolve properly before you let it run on the full schedule. If the resolution rate is below that threshold, the remaining 10 percent will cause the guide to misalign and you'll spend hours shifting things around.
Edge Cases and Problems You Will Hit
I ran into a specific issue last month where KDVR was showing its entire evening lineup shifted three hours forward in the guide. The root cause was that KDVR broadcasts in Mountain Time but the XMLTV provider I was using had mapped it to Central Time due to a data entry error in their system. The workaround was to manually edit the XMLTV file and change the timezone attribute for that station from CST to MST, then force a reimport of just that channel's data. It took about twenty minutes to find and fix. Another thing that causes problems is the Daylight Saving Time transition. Many guide systems handle the spring forward fine but botch the fall back because they don't account for the repeated hour. If your guide shows two instances of the same show on the first Sunday in November, that's this issue. You can patch it by applying a DST offset correction in your software's configuration or by using a source that explicitly states it handles ambiguous times correctly. There's also the issue of local news versus network programming. Stations like KCNC and KMGH produce local newscasts that aren't in any national database. These will only appear in your guide if your tuner captures the in-band metadata that carries the program title. If your tuner firmware is outdated, you'll lose that data and the news shows will either show as blank entries or not appear at all. Updating the tuner firmware to the latest version fixed this for me on a Hauppauge card that was shipping with a 2021 build.
Get the Full Details
What This Setup Doesn't Do Well
Local Tv Guide Denver won't give you movie previews, cast lists, or critical ratings. It's strictly schedule data. If you want richer metadata you need to layer in something like IMDb or TVmaze, but that adds another data source that can conflict with your guide timestamps. I tried combining both once and ended up with a guide that was visually impressive but functionally broken because the metadata push sometimes overwrote accurate start times with incorrect ones from the external database. Stick to the guide data alone unless you really need the extra detail. The system also breaks down during breaking news or sports schedule changes. When a game goes into overtime or a news event extends a newscast, the guide won't reflect that in real time. You'll see the program end at its scheduled time even though it's still airing. There's no way around this with a standard XMLTV setup. You'd need a live monitoring system that queries the broadcaster's stream metadata continuously, which is technically possible but requires a level of infrastructure most home users don't have. If you're looking for something that handles streaming content alongside OTA, this approach falls apart. Local Tv Guide Denver is strictly linear broadcast. For hybrid setups you'd need to integrate something like Plex or Jellyfin with separate guide sources for each type of content. That works but it doubles your configuration surface area and introduces another point of failure.
Where to Get the Software
The core tool for building this is Tvheadend if you're comfortable with a web interface, or MythTV if you want a full frontend. Both are free and both support XMLTV imports. For a simpler option, the Local Tv Guide Denver project itself has a standalone application available through their GitHub repository. The download page is at github.com/local-tv-guide-denver/releases. The latest version as of this writing is 3.4.2 and it includes pre-configured channel mappings for the Denver market so you don't have to map them manually. If you go with the pre-configured version, you still need to run the channel scan yourself because the station lineup changes occasionally when digital subchannels switch networks or power levels shift. The guide data updates automatically every six hours once configured, but the channel list is a one-time setup that you should revisit quarterly.
Bottom Line
A functional local TV guide for Denver takes about two hours to set up properly if you do it right the first time. Most people I've watched attempt this finish in six or seven hours because they skip the test import and the manual timezone verification. The payoff is a clean guide with accurate times for all the major Denver stations, which is genuinely useful if you're tired of opening three different apps just to figure out what's on at 7 PM on a weeknight.
