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

Joe Hickey jfwd at phlobus.net
Tue Jan 25 20:10:14 UTC 2011


On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 11:53 AM, Peter Watkins <peterw at tux.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 11:29:18AM -0500, Tom Bongiorno wrote:
>> 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.
>

I don't think such a tool would be able to reliably indicate much.  In
my case I have Time Warner and they have all sorts of nonsense on the
wire.  Most are encrypted, but even this is not reliably detectable as
far as I've seen.  You would only be able to notice a new stream that
was not present before, or a stream that was previously there and has
gone away.  But I think the vast majority of the time, the change
would be rearranging channels on existing transports.  And I have yet
to find a channel scanner that can actually tell one channel apart
from another, since they all seem to get garbage names whenever I run
a scan.

But on the upside, since there are only about a dozen channels that
come in the clear, any change can be seen pretty readily just by
flipping through them using the LiveTV feature.  So far, it's happened
only once over the past year.


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