Gracenote is a commercial database of meta information for all sorts of media. In the case of your TV the linked metadata within the Freeview signal is passed online to Gracenote, they look up their tables as provided by the TV companies and producers to provide a more enriched EPG experience back to the TV. This can include photographs, synopses, production credits as standard and I gather on some TVs links out to trailers too. It's use is fairly standard across a wide range of manufacturers and platforms.
Yep - Gracenote has had quite a history. It started as an open source CD Database (CDDB) and then became a commercial operation. It was owned by Sony for a while - and quite a few Sony TVs and Blu-ray players/DVD players had Gracenote access for TV guides and CD look-up. Lots of Sony consumer disc players lost access to Gracenote when Sony sold Gracenote, or didn't renew their licenses, which means that you no longer get CD track information as you used to. (I guess fewer and fewer people play physical CDs in optical players these days...)
The move from being open source to commercial wasn't uncontroversial, as people contributed their CD data to an open source platform (with the expectation that they would be able to access it, and others uploaded CD information) but then it effectively moved behind a paywall ...
I remember Gracenote was built into Winamp. So if you were particularly anal about such things, you could let Gracenote update all the metadata for your MP3 collection, and then get iTunes to do its sorting feature where it renamed the files and put them in folders correctly named for the albums. You had to use both though bc at the time iTunes metadata search only worked with CDs.
Always wanted a gracenote for my folder of stuff downloaded from tvforum which to this day are in a folder structure more related to who uploaded the file and are full of duplicates
I remember Gracenote was built into Winamp. So if you were particularly anal about such things, you could let Gracenote update all the metadata for your MP3 collection, and then get iTunes to do its sorting feature where it renamed the files and put them in folders correctly named for the albums. You had to use both though bc at the time iTunes metadata search only worked with CDs.
Always wanted a gracenote for my folder of stuff downloaded from tvforum which to this day are in a folder structure more related to who uploaded the file and are full of duplicates
That's more sorting than I do, there are plenty of files with nonsense names and they're all lumped into one folder.
For some reason I'm getting a lot of 'To Be Announced' on the TV Guide between the hours of 3pm and 6pm on certain channels. It seems to be more prevalent on the Viacom channels.
Could you possibly show some screenshots of your TV'sEPG and menu system? I'm looking for a new TV and any I research I can't actually see much regarding how the OSD looks. I can't get to any electrical store either to have a play with the TV's and I like the idea of the ambilight TV's. If you can't, its no problem, just thought I'd ask.
How do you find the operation of the TV? Ease of use, options, decent remote, extras, speed of the OS etc.