[mythtv-users] Comcast KNOWS Myths HDHomerun Channel Scanner is broken

Ronald Frazier ron at ronfrazier.net
Fri Apr 24 18:18:28 UTC 2009


Honestly, I think this has nothing to do with Myth. Myth users a so
small of a group, Comcast is probably barely aware of them.

Second, I have discovered the exact same thing with Wide Open West. I
run the hdhomerun_config scan several times a year and store the
output in a log. When I last ran it about a week ago, I discovered
(like you on Comcast) that all of the "analog" stations are being
transmitted in a digital (but non-HD) version. However, one difference
is that WOW hasn't dropped the analog channels like Comcast has....but
that's beside the point. Looking back at my saved scan logs, the
channels were added sometime in the last 3 months.

Anyway, like your situation, myth sees my WOW digital cable channels
as encrypted, but the HD versions of the local stations they carry
show up in myth just fine. Looking at your scan log, one thing I
notice they have in common is that the callsign for all of your
channels is 0.0 instead of being something like FOX or whatever. Thats
the same way my scan is. I don't know enough about the way digital
transmissions are done, but it would seem to me that at least part of
the program table is missing.

Interestingly, doing a scan with my HDTV's built in tuner, it finds
all of the digital channels perfectly, but it doesn't know what their
channel numbers are. So instead of being channel 25, it shows up on
the TV as something like 112.4 (which is just the primary channel
number and then the subchannel number).

In the end, I think it has very little to do with myth and just more
to do with them trying to provide the customer with an incentive to
rent a cable box. In fact, "provide an incentive" might be a bad
term...maybe trick or force would be more correct. I'm just hoping
they don't take it a step further and actually encrypt the channels,
or at a minimum start rotating the frequencies of the channels on a
regular basis.

-- 
Ron


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