EIT
EIT is typically available over digital television signals, either terrestrial, cable or satellite. With terrestrial signals, each channel provides it's own EIT. Information is usually only available for the upcoming 24 hours. With satellite, the EIT is broadcast on it's own stream, or an Aggregate Event Information Table (AEIT), and contains information for all the channels broadcasted, and can provide scheduling information for more than a week.
It seems that for some people EIT only works when channels have been scanned by MythTV (this has been reported to have been necessary by a DVB-T user in the UK and a DVB-C user in the Netherlands). Importing channels.conf doesn't provide enough information for MythTV to use EIT.
Note for Australian DVB-T users: Australian TV stations only broadcast the bare minimum Now and Next EIT information, (except ABC which are trialing a 5 day EPG) therefore there is little value in using this data with MythTV. Moreover, it is often a generic title such as "SPECIAL EVENT" or "AFTERNOON MOVIE."
Tip: If EIT does not appear to show in the OSD, you can try to enable EIT in MythTV 0.20 (assuming EIT is compiled in mythtv) using a channels.conf created from a program such as 'scan' (dvb-utils). Import channels.conf into mythtv-setup, then delete the channels. This will have populated MythTV with the correct transports for your transmitter/transponder (sometimes MythTV cannot find the transports on it's own). Now let MythTV do a full scan using the existing transports. You should now have EIT showing in MythTV. Users of DVB-T (Freeview) in UK will now have the next seven days of listings available (it may take some time for the listings to build up as the EIT is scanned).
You still need mythfilldatabase Even though you may be collected listings over the airwaves, you still need to run 'mythfilldatabase --no-delete' periodically in order to clear out old data from the database. This is best put in a crontab entry. If you don't do this, the system will grind to a halt!