[mythtv-users] Help: No program info for QAM256 channels

[Steven Ihde]

On Monday 26 May 2008 09:58, Mark J. Small wrote:
> I've been putting off setting up my qam card because it sounded
> pretty painful.

It wasn't really that bad...

>
> Here's the way I think it SHOULD work.  Shame I haven't coded
> anything in 8 years, and don't know c++...
>
> Set up schedules direct lineup that includes the digital channels. 
> Perhaps create a lineup with only the digital channels.  The channel
> numbers will be the meaningless (set up arbitrarily by the cable
> company, having no relation to frequency/pid) ones that show up on
> the digital cable box.
>
> Scan for channels with the QAM card/HDHR, or input a channel map
> created with DVB tools.  These channel numbers will be the real
> frequencies/pids that are sent down the pipe.

I don't think this is quite correct.  Depending on your cable provider, 
the channel numbering information may or may not be present in the 
stream, and may be present for some channels and not others.  So in 
some cases you'll get a channel name like UNKNOWN129#7, which means no 
ID was found in the stream, and 129 is the "real" channel number, pid 
7.  In other cases you'll get a channel name like "44.1", which means 
it's probably a local OTA channel being rebroadcast on cable, and the 
channel number in the stream was preserved.  But this has no relation 
to the physical frequency being used by the cable company to transmit 
the signal.

>
> Map the schedules direct lineup
>
> Go through all of the found/imported channels, and for each one,
> choose which channel in the schedules direct lineup the channel is. 
> No messing around with xmltv ids, no database hacking.
>
> For instance, on my cable system, I'd be stepping through the found
> channels, and find that there is an unencrypted channel on channel 39
> (315 MHz), pid 7. I'd watch it long enough to see that it is TLC,
> then in the channel editor, I'd tell myth that this is channel 77,
> TLC in the SD lineup.
>
> That's would be enough in my IDEAL world.

Here's how I did it.

1. Don't import anything from SchedulesDirect yet, but get a list of all 
the available channels and XMLTV ids ready.

2. Scan for channels with Myth.  Make sure to tell it to skip encrypted 
channels, and you probably don't want the audio-only channels either.

3. Step through each channel, watching it long enough to figure out what 
it is.  

4.  Use the on-screen channel editor to set the XMLTV id appropriately 
for each channel.

5. Once you've set all the XMLTV ids, pull the lineup from 
SchedulesDirect with "mythfilldatabase --do-channel-updates".  This 
will rename all the channels to conform with the cable-company-assigned 
channel numbers.

6.  Advanced: In some cases an HD and an SD version of the same channel 
are available with different channel numbers and callsigns (e.g. in the 
SF Bay Area Comcast channel 2 is SD, callsign KTVU, and Comcast channel 
702 is KTVUDT or somesuch in HD).  If you have an HD and a non-HD tuner 
card, some conflicts can be resolved by recording the HD version of one 
show and the SD version of another.  In these cases, reassign the 
callsigns for the HD channels to be the same as the SD channels.  That 
way Myth will treat the two of them as a single "Channel".  So 
a "channel record" rule should produce the desired result -- it will 
consider both the HD and SD versions as eligible for recording.  Make 
sure you do this AFTER "mythfilldatabase --do-channel-updates", because 
that will reset the callsigns back to the ones SchedulesDirect uses.

-Steve