It's not embarassing: the XMLTV instructions are really poor -- because they are not supported by Sage...
There is a HOWTO here:
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=1484
but it includes irrelevant stuff for the US and is out of date..
There is a better plugin here for UK data:
http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...&threadid=2234
This will get the EPG data into Sage, but then you have to remap the imported channels to the real channel numbers because the XMLTV data has no idea of which frequency your broadcasters use, and will just put everything in a semi-random order...
For analogue channels, it might be better as a first stage to set up a source with no data, then go through each channel number in turn finding out what broadcaster is on it -- you can then use this information later to remap the imported channels.
Other users might be better suited to give advice on getting Sage to change channels on the digibox automatically using a IR transmitter...