Prevue Guide Forums

First of all, I think what you guys are doing is simply awesome. The Prevue Guide/Channel was one of my absolute favorite channels growing up, and its great that there are others out there besides myself that express interest in this great piece of TV history.

I have actually lurked the forums for nearly a year (and yes, I believe my joining this forum is long overdue), and while I am not a programmer or anything, I have followed this forum's manipulation with the Atari EPG, as well as more recently the Blue Grid ESQ program. The blue grid is the one I remember from my childhood, and the moment I saw the first video posted on youtube in 2006, I have had every subsequent video on my PC's hard drive. (I have nearly all of the ones they took down as well). Last year, I felt I hit the jackpot when I stumbled across this forum and came across your discovery of ESQ, and I'd like to thank you guys for your hard work in bringing the classic back.

I do bring one new thing to the table, however. I am wondering if ESQ had the capability to appear like its predecessor. I came across this youtube video from 1994 where it is the Amiga version of the program, but it is styled like the EPG Sr.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeolMiEP1Yk

Let me know what you guys think.

EDIT: It looks like this video was seen, but I never saw the question asked. Is this a different program from the one we have?

First off, welcome to the forums!

Thanks for posting this, but we had already discussed this just a little bit over here (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=179&start=40#p1609). We haven't quite figured out how or why this happened, or whether or not this is the same software as the one we have.

I do have to tell you though, there might be a lot of grateful souls over here if you uploaded the YouTube videos that you've saved but were deleted from YouTube

Help yourself to the channel I created for this :

http://www.youtube.com/user/20CenturyFan

I apologize for any quality cut due to my converting them to WMV for pocketPC back in 2006-2008 when I got many of these, but upon looking at it, they look better as WMVs than Youtube FLVs. I can assure this, however, that any video uploaded by the former youtuber norbie13 I have a better version of it (including the two instances of EPG)

I have other videos, but they are either still elsewhere on youtube or on the page of the user named swbrwnskins. Let me know if I missed anything though!

20CenturyFan wrote:Help yourself to the channel I created for this :

http://www.youtube.com/user/20CenturyFan

I apologize for any quality cut due to my converting them to WMV for pocketPC back in 2006-2008 when I got many of these, but upon looking at it, they look better as WMVs than Youtube FLVs. I can assure this, however, that any video uploaded by the former youtuber norbie13 I have a better version of it (including the two instances of EPG)

I have other videos, but they are either still elsewhere on youtube or on the page of the user named swbrwnskins. Let me know if I missed anything though!

Thanks for doing that, really appreciate it! If you find any more that aren't on YouTube, please post them

Maybe some people have seen all of these before, but I found this one especially interesting because it seems to show a time when Prevue Guide used classical music in the background instead of the infamous Prevue Guide theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM6h8fMnvXA

I had wondered about that too when I first found that one. I thought it was dubbed in by the original uploader of the video... but the audio quality states otherwise... it sounds like it came right from their VHS. I seem to recall one being used in the background of a Prevue Tonight during the same era (with the announcer talking over it), but which one that was slips my mind at the moment.

I just noticed something too... a number of things happened at the 48 second mark. This Amiga had a mega crash with multiple things going wrong at once...

-One second into the preview for "Lassie", the local Amiga machine crashed, resulting in it reverting to the satellite feed's full video, including the satellite time and listings (Notice how the hours change +3, but the minutes and seconds remain constant.). That second before the crash, you could see the movie descriptor on the right side with the "Lassie" title, as well as the local listings and local time. There was a failure of the local software.

My guess is that at the precise moment of the crash, the sound feed was switched to the classical music we are hearing rather than the audio for the "Lassie" preview continuing. This kind of music is not typical of the Prevue Guide, particularly in the listings era, which leads me to second guess its authenticity... but then again it sounds like alot of trouble to dub audio that matches the quality of the video, so my guess is that is probably is, in fact, authentic.

20CenturyFan wrote:My guess is that at the precise moment of the crash, the sound feed was switched to the classical music we are hearing rather than the audio for the "Lassie" preview continuing. This kind of music is not typical of the Prevue Guide, particularly in the listings era, which leads me to second guess its authenticity... but then again it sounds like alot of trouble to dub audio that matches the quality of the video, so my guess is that is probably is, in fact, authentic.

I have read something about classical music being used in the background of Prevue Guide, so I don't think it's fake. I think it was an old YouTube comment.

Was it a local classical music radio station? I remember when our local Prevue Guide's audio would fail or it would crash and it'd revert audio to a local radio station

That music was almost certainly dubbed in. The track used is one that comes standard with Windows XP.

Look at the last few frames of the video, it shows the pay per view schedule and at the bottom there is no listings. The date is however February 24 and, according to the time, came on before Prevue Tonight.

20CenturyFan wrote:I just noticed something too... a number of things happened at the 48 second mark. This Amiga had a mega crash with multiple things going wrong at once...

-One second into the preview for "Lassie", the local Amiga machine crashed, resulting in it reverting to the satellite feed's full video, including the satellite time and listings (Notice how the hours change +3, but the minutes and seconds remain constant.). That second before the crash, you could see the movie descriptor on the right side with the "Lassie" title, as well as the local listings and local time. There was a failure of the local software.

I have seen at least bits of this video before and I don't think this is a crash. I think this is a local technician doing some config on the amiga. The window that comes up is a standard 1.3 Amigados window, and there's some typing that goes on. Also that the proper display disappears immediately, and typing starts pretty much immediately. Unfortunately it's too low quality to see what but I guess it's some local configuration for the inserts and/or what is displayed relevant to the local customisation of the system.

Also the audio is dubbed on, it continues over obvious edits (like at the end of the second on-screen editor bit, the seconds jump)