Best settings to refresh Freesat channels (1 Viewer)

[Digsy]

Hopefully a simple question: I have not watched Free-to-air satellite TV for months and so unsurprisingly the other day when I wanted to watch something on UK Channel 4+1 I found that the channel had moved. Actually, loads of channels had moved. So I did a rescan on both my tuners but found that pretty much none of the channels actually got updated in the TV configuration so I had to go through and manually tune them using data from KingOfSat.

I had to do this all the time with Windows Media Centre but I thought this would be a thing of the past with MP2. I think If I have to do it again it will be enough to make me bin the whole thing and just go and buy a cheap Freesat box off the shelf...

Question is: What did I do wrong? I am sure I had "detect channel movement" switched on... What are the best settings to use here, and why are they not the default settings?

 

[Digsy]

Resurrecting this from 2021. Its time to do a rescan again and this time I REALLY do not want to have to set everything up from scratch again as a result.

Surely this should be simple? What settings should I be using?

 

[CyberSimian]

What settings should I be using?

I have never used satellite TV, so the following may be incorrect:

(1) Before making any changes, export your channel list to a separate file. Presumably you currently have many channels receivable, but not all of the ones that you are expecting or which you received previously. By saving your current channel list, you can later import it to return to the current state if the rescans actually make things worse.

(2) Before scanning, I think that you should select Update satellite list. According to the Wiki, this will download the current list of satellites from the MP web site. I am not aware that this list has changed recently. Nevertheless, it won't do any harm (probably ), and it might do some good.

(3) As you surmised, you should select Enable channel movement detection. This helps to prevent TV Server creating duplicate channels (but it is not 100% successful).

(4) Select Enable DVB-S2 channels tuning/scanning. The Wiki says that if this setting is not enabled, HD channels will not be detectable.

(5) Confirm that the correct satellite is selected for the scan. Your screenshot shows "Astra". Is that the correct satellite? I mention this because although I use DVB-T/T2, in the past I started a scan with "Australia" as the selected country . (I had had some problem that required resetting/re-installing TV Server, and so TV Server had lost its memory of what I had scanned previously.)

You cannot be the only MP user in the UK that uses satellite. If there were a general problem, I think that other users would have reported problems. The only one that comes to mind at the moment is one that involved use of a CAM (in Finland), but I don't think that that applies in your case.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[CyberSimian]

I am sure I had "detect channel movement" switched on

One further point: with this option enabled, TV Server is able to avoid generating duplicate channels in many cases, but not all cases (this is simply a result of the nature of the information that is available to TV Server).

If you do get duplicates, the old non-working channel will remain in the list, but there should be the new working channel also in the list. However, these may not be adjacent in the list. So you can be mislead into thinking that the new channel has not been found, because you are looking at the non-working entry in the list, and the working entry is somewhere else in the list (probably off screen).

This is what I do:

(1) Expand the channel list on the right, so that you can see the channel numbers.
(2) Click the column heading for the channel numbers to sort the list into ascending order.
(3) Visually scan the channel numbers looking for duplicate numbers (they will now be adjacent).
(4) When you find duplicates, click "Preview" for each in turn to determine which entry is the working entry.
(5) Delete the non-working entry.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[CyberSimian]

Its time to do a rescan again

Although my suggestions in the previous post are useful as a general procedure to follow, it looks as though the problem is caused by errors in the transponder list. See this thread ( post number 10 contains an updated transponder list).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[Digsy]

@CyberSimian

Regarding putting the updated transponder list in: c:\ProgramData\Team Mediaportal\Mediaportal TV Server\TuningParameters\dvbs

Where is that folder for an MP2 installation? There is no folder called "Tuning Parameters\dvbs" under c:\ProgramData\Team Mediaportal on my PC.

 

[ge2301]

@CyberSimian

Regarding putting the updated transponder list in: c:\ProgramData\Team Mediaportal\Mediaportal TV Server\TuningParameters\dvbs

Where is that folder for an MP2 installation? There is no folder called "Tuning Parameters\dvbs" under c:\ProgramData\Team Mediaportal on my PC.

For TVE3:

C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MP2-Server\SlimTVCore\v3.0\TuningParameters

For TVE3.5

C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MP2-Server\SlimTVCore\v3.5\TuningParameters

 

[CyberSimian]

@ge2301 : While this subject is fresh in our minds, has the UK transponder list been updated in MP2's copy of TVE3 and also in the transponder list for TVE3.5? Does it happen automatically, or does there need to be some manual intervention?

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[ge2301]

@ge2301 : While this subject is fresh in our minds, has the UK transponder list been updated in MP2's copy of TVE3 and also in the transponder list for TVE3.5? Does it happen automatically, or does there need to be some manual intervention?

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

I've no idea unfortunately, I'm not using TV myself. I guess the included ones are not updated. Also lists for US are missing.

 

[Digsy]

So I finally got around to doing this and I'm pretty disappointed to report that once again simply updating my existing channels proved impossible. Despite repeated scans, my MP2 refused to recognise that anything had changed until I deleted all the channels completely. Then the next rescan found them all including the new BBC HD channels, but of course now I had to re do all my channel selections, groups, etc. from scratch.

Also I now have an EPG issue with radio channels which I will start a new thread on.