[mythtv-users] New frequency for NY NBC OTA channel 4

[Tom Dexter]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 4:06 AM, John Pilkington <J.Pilk at tesco.net> wrote:
> On 03/04/18 03:02, Tom Dexter wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 8:26 PM, Tom Dexter <digitalaudiorock at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I just found out the hard way that apparently NY NBC channel 4
>>> apparently changed frequency on April 1.
>>>
>>> ...snip
>>>
>>> I've never been comfortable doing that channel scan. Frankly it about
>>> gives me a heart attack. It's NEVER clear as to what it's going to do
>>> etc and I always have visions of needing to restore my database. In
>>> the past I've had it arbitrarily rename all my channels from using the
>>> dot I have now (for example 4.1) to dashes (4-1). If I recall
>>> correctly there used to be some option for that but I'm not sure there
>>> is any longer. I haven't needed to rescan much at all in the 10+ years
>>> I've been using MythTV. Maybe it's just me, but doing so seems to have
>>> been more harrowing  every time I've done it.
>>>
>>
>> I was just looking and recalled this mess I had years back:
>>
>> https://lists.gt.net/mythtv/users/571152
>>
>> I'm hoping to avoid messes like that.
>>
>> If someone can at least clear me up on the various prompts in the
>> rescan it'd help me a lot. I think, if I can recall, it tells you
>> about channels that have changed, channels that have been added, and
>> channels that have gone away. I've never seen any of this documented
>> clearly anywhere. If I'm wrong on that please let me know where it is.
>> It's always been a total mystery to me.
>>
>> I can't recall the options it gives you but I recall them being
>> extremely unclear. There's an "ignore all" and a "delete all" and I
>> believe a "hide all"(?). I'm assuming that the hide simply marks those
>> channels as hidden(?). I'm most concerned about the delete. I would
>> assume that would delete those channels, but I've read things
>> indicating that delete just deletes them from the scan(?). That's the
>> one I'm most concerned about as it could delete my Philadelphia
>> stations, which I do use on rare occasions (Philly NFL games for
>> example). If I recall, some, but not all of those steps have an option
>> to manually deal with them one at a time, which would probably be
>> ideal. Maybe I'm just best off letting add, change, and update
>> everything just to be clean. If I loose my Philly stations I can deal
>> with that later I suppose.
>>
>> Thanks in advance if anyone understands this better than I.
>>
>> Tom
>
>
> I just googled 'tv broadcast frequencies NYC changes 2018' and got several
> hits, although real numbers seem well buried. 'fcc repack' might be a good
> phrase.
>
> If you find the new frequency, mythtv-setup has a 'Transport editor' that
> should let you enter that and rescan only multiplexes that you have lost;
> but of course the menus we see are likely to be different.
>
> HTH
>
> John P
>

Thanks for all the replies! I think that using Stephen's scripts is a
little more than I want to take on. Also, I have a feeling that the
new frequency may actually be an entirely new transport. Given all
that, here's what I think I'm going to do: Looking at this:

https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Command_Line_Channel_Scanner

I should be able to run the following (where the 1 is the cardid of my
first capturecard:

mythtv-setup --scan atsc-vsb8-us 1 --scan-save-only

As far as I can tell, that just loads the scan data into these three
tables (which can be imported later):

channelscan
channelscan_channel
channelscan_dtv_multiplex

That at least gives me a very benign way of seeing what the scan would
actually do, and I can take it from there.

Thanks!
Tom