[mythtv-users] Rigging Channel Lineup

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 21:49 -0400, R. G. Newbury wrote:
> I have a mix of analog cable and OTA digital channels. The OTA channels 
> show up in order of the actual channel frequency and changing channum 
> (from 7.1 to 107.1) does not change the order.

They are ordered by ATSC major and minor, when the channum is of the
form 7.1,7-1,7_1,71, but ordered by channum as a number if channum
is an integer other than "71" in the case of 7-1, so long as all the
other integer sorting can work with all the non-ATSC channels in your
channel list. The reason 107.1 fails to get reordered is because
it is neither a straight remapping of the ATSC channel nor an
integer channel. channelutil.cpp's lt_smart() is using a fall-back
which retains a deterministic ordering, I would guess it's ordering
by the ATSC major and minor.

> I understood that digital channels do not use the freqid, but instead 
> use the tuning information referenced through mplexid into the dtv 
> _multiplex table. But that seems to make atsc_major_chan, and 
> atsc_minor_chan redundant along with freqid.
> Clearly, analog channels need only the freqid. But do digital channels 
> use that field at all? Can I arbitrarily change that field?

The frequency in the dtv_multiplex table is used whenever a
dtv_multiplex row is referenced by a channel row, whether the
channel is digital or not. A pcHDTV card can work without the
dtv_multiplex table when using the old V4L drivers, but MythTV
doesn't insert these types of channels in the channel scanner.
The atsc_major_chan and atsc_minor_chan are not redundant at
all, none of the channels in NYC are on the major channel the
frequency in dtv_multiplex would indicate, but the ATSC major
and minor are still needed to pick out the sub-channel to tune
to. (Maybe things are a lot more orderly in Canada?) 

> I tried to read the code, but got lost. Very quickly I might add. I was 
> unable to even find where the mysql select statement for the EPG is...

Look at GuideGrid::fillChannelInfos() this pulls in the
channels, then look at ChannelUtil::GetChannels() and
ChannelUtil::SortChannels(channels, channelOrdering, true)
these two are the real meat of what is going on. GetChannels gets
all the channels grouped by channum and callsign. Then 
SortChannels sorts them by the configured "ChannelOrdering",
by default this is "channum", but this can be configured to
sort by "callsign". While the default ordering is called
"channum" this is only for backward compatibility in the db,
this is really what was called "smart" ordering during
development. The whole "smart" algorithm for ordering is
described by channelutil.cpp's lt_smart() function.

-- Daniel