[mythtv-users] report QAM changes? (Comcast Digital Switchover)

[Peter Watkins]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 11:29:18AM -0500, Tom Bongiorno wrote:

> I would love such a tool, but I doubt it would work.  It might only be
> able to tell you that there is no longer a channel at the expected
> frequency, but not a different channel.  Comcast use to be very good
> at keeping the channel info in the channel table on each frequency,
> but lately that is not the case. 

Good point. 

> A channel that should be identified
> as 3.1 is now 82.1 for some unknown reason.  This could change again
> since there is no logic behind it.  MythTV and each of my TVs have
> trouble determining the channel info, and they all do it differently.

Perhaps it's time to complain to the FCC, your attorney general, and 
whoever manages the local Comcast franchise? :-) I expect they'd be 
especially sympathetic if your QAM-tuning TVs have trouble. 

On its face, messing with QAM lineups and metadata looks like a scam 
intended to force customers to rent Set Top Boxes, costing us money,
cluttering our homes, and making us use more electricity.

I should probably do the same -- IIRC, last time I scanned, the QAM channel
info for the local CMS affiliate was messed up -- their main channel listed
as the secondary, and the secondary listed as the main. In MythTV, I changed
the xmltvid attribute so the program guide works.

> Determining the channel info is the key.  Until that can be reliable,
> we may not be able to automate anything usable.

Don't you think a tool could at least reliably indicate that something
had changed? You might not trust it to update your database, but if a
frequency in the database suddenly has no unencrypted signal, that's a 
problem. And it may merit investigation if the channel metadata has changed.

-Peter