[mythtv-users] Digital switchover channel confusion

[Mike Perkins]

On 30/03/11 21:19, John Pilkington wrote:
>
> For the Waltham transmitter the multiplexes are now on 490, 538, 570,
> 642, 666 and 698 MHz.  The 538 has moved from 514.  The 'new' multiplex
> that I saw ( and deleted) was from the Nottingham relay.  I think I
> should have deleted all channels before scanning the new set of muxes;
> I'll try that later.
>
Yup. I guess the digital scanning system isn't particularly optimised for UK 
users. I find that to get the best results I have to do the following:

- Delete all channels.
- Do a full scan to pick up all available muxes.
- Figure out which muxes I'm actually interested in by reference to web 
documents [1].
- Using the Transport Editor, delete('D') the extraneous ones [2].
- Do a scan of each specific transport one by one, carefully replying 'Ignore' 
to all questions about off-air channels. Note. This /will/ give you different 
results than you would get doing an all-transport scan. No idea why.
- Run tv_grab_uk_rt --configure <sourcename> to get list of xmltvids
- Use the channel editor to insert the correct xmltvids [3] in the channel 
entries for those channels I am interested in [4], otherwise the next run of 
mythfilldatabase will fail to match anything and insert a whole load of 
duplicate - and useless - channel entries [5].

[1] The transmitter name is available in the received data, because you can see 
it scrolling up the 'terminal' screen during the scan. This field ought to be 
added to the mux records in the database and displayed in the transport editor 
to help find the ones of interest.
[2] The output of the transport editor mux list ought to be sorted on frequency.
[3] In the US I guess xmltvids are numeric values. In the UK they are URIs and 
can get quite long, I've seen them up to 40 characters or so. Editing these in a 
field that displays about 6 characters is a pain.
[4] Yeah, I know there's a script I can use to skip this step, but it doesn't 
help when the names of the channels keep changing.
[5] mfdb appears to match on the 5-character call sign. This is a North-American 
construct, UK channel identifiers are just strings and don't work this way at all.

Yeah, I know, I should keep up with what's going on and submit patches. Maybe if 
I wasn't so ill and didn't have enough other pressing things to do I would be 
more active here. All I can do right now is perform a QA function. Just running 
the procedure outlined above takes enough effort.

-- 

Mike Perkins