Channel list organising?

[SwissBuster]

I'm new to the MediaPortal / HTPC thing, and have been going through the steep learning curve in the last few weeks. Most of this learning is getting my satellite card to work with TV server, which is the main purpose for the new HTPC.

I have found that I've made a lot of setup errors and so have re-scanned the satelite channel listing several times. Each time I get a few thousand channels listed. I only want to display a handful of channels in MediaPortal, so after each scan I have to go through the list to uncheck all those I don't want. Its tedious, to say the least. Clicking the 'uncheck decrypted' box helps, but it would be good to have a method to uncheck all. It there a trick to do this?

I've scanned the help files and I think the answer might lie with channel groups, but for the life of me can't figure this out... if it were a simple excel list this would take about 30 seconds to organise instead of the hour its taking me now.

[SwissBuster]

I didn't find a way to prevent this, but I do have a method that means you only need to do this once...

In the TV server config, under the TV channels tab, I created a new channel group called Favourites. I added my favoured channels to Favourites (under all channels, right mouse click on any TV channel and click add to group) and then sorted them into the order that I wanted. Once everthing is as I wanted it, I used the export function in the TV server config (under 'TV channels') to save all these channel settings. This creates a file (default name is export.xml) that you can use to import channel listing should you ever need to do a reinstall.

I personally went through the 3000 channels listed in the 'Channels' listing and unclicked all those I did not want, although in theory you don't need to do this. This means that in the channel list or TV guide in MP when 'All channels' is selected, I only get the handful of channels I watch.

Creating a 'favourites' group is useful because your channel listing in MP (and TV guide) can be set to view this list. Its a lot easier to sort the handful of channels under favourites than to sort them in the 1000s of channels under 'Channels'.

For the future, when recanning the satellites, any new channels would be added to the bottom of the 'Channels' group, which is then quite painless to uncheck. Any channel updates are automatically updated. If there are new channels that I want to add to favourites, this is easy. Remember to export when you've made any changes!