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

[Robert McNamara]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Eric Sharkey <eric at lisaneric.org> wrote:
> 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.
>

The scanner putting values in the freqid should have *no effect* if
you had followed the correct practice of setting up your channels.
See below.

> 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.

What you have done is a long, long way from the normal way.  Or at
least, a pretty long way from the correct way.

You changed way too much, and it sounds like much of it was manual.  I
have no idea the provenance of the information in your database, or
how it has gotten there, and it sounds like there have been so many
steps that you're not all that sure any more either.  The correct way
to go about this is:

1.  Scan
2.  Set xmltvids for each channel.
3.  Run mythfilldatabase --do-channel-updates.

That's it.  You've changed so much now that no matter what you do,
honestly, I'm not prepared to recognize anything you're seeing as a
bug.  The data just has no integrity any more.  The three steps work
for others, and work reliably.

>> 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?

I'm saying you should have followed the three steps above.  Scan, set
XMLTVids, run mythfilldatabase.  That's really all there is to it.

Robert