[mythtv-users] how to set xmltvid to unknown and keep it there?

[Eric Sharkey]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 4:11 PM, Robert McNamara
<robert.mcnamara at gmail.com> wrote:
> No, because the HDHR and other digital tuners have *no concept* of
> what the virtual/box channel number is--

Exactly!  If it doesn't know what the correct freqid field is, why is
it populating that field at all?  It should be left as NULL or 0 or
some other harmless value.  Instead, it's populating it based on the
actual physical frequency, and that's just bogus based on what you've
said.  This is the root of what's causing all the problems I'm having.

>  This is why most people simply
> edit the channels and put the xmltvid's in-- then you can run
> mythfilldatabase --do-channel-updates and it will fix the visible
> values to be what you expect.  You are trying to do it the opposite
> way of how most people try, by getting mythfilldatabase to match
> channel number instead of simply telling it which xmltvid applies to
> the channel.

No, I'm doing it the normal way.  I did a channel scan, then for each
channel, I've been trying to set channum, xmltvid, callsign, and
whatever else I happen to know about the channel.  (All the fields
visible in the Live TV channel edit menu, which does not include the
freqid. All of my freqid values are whatever they were following the
scan.)  But I have a bunch of channels for which I don't know the
xmltvid yet.  Some channels I know the virtual channel number, but
they're not in the schedules direct listings.  Other channels I just
don't know what they are.  This thread is all about those channels.
The problem is that every night mythfilldatabase comes in and sets
them to have the xmltvid for the history channel because of that bogus
freqid.  I can't leave them blank until I have enough time to figure
out what they should be.

> Regarding your SQL. yes, assuming you haven't changed any channel
> numbers, that would clone them into the freqid table.

I've changed nearly all of the channel numbers.  That's the whole
point.  It's taken many hours to figure out what each one is, but I've
set the channel numbers using the channum field alone, but you're
saying I should set both channum and freqid even though there's no way
to do that from the live tv channel editor.  Or am I still missing
something?

Eric