Help with TV setup (1 Viewer)

[Old school Bob]

I don't know how I missed that. It's been scanning for over 4 hours and nothing in those bars. And it's still scanning.



I do have stuff in my TV channels under TV mapping but I'm not sure they're TV channels.

Well, maybe they are TV channels - I found Fox Business and Discovery. The names just don't look familiar.

Tonight I'll leave it running all night if I have to. Seems to take forever.

 

[TLD]

Channels with a red encircled T are encrypted or scrambled.
Click on "TV Channels" after the scan.
See if there are any channels that are green there.

 

[Old school Bob]

So far no green. Only red. I wish I could copy/paste the list but it won't let me.

It's been scanning for 6 hours and only up to 106. Guess I'll leave it going all night.

I have over 1000 channels - this could take days. I must be doing something wrong.

Thanks for staying with me.

Bob

 

[CyberSimian]

Tonight I'll leave it running all night if I have to. Seems to take forever.

The screen shot that you showed in the first image in this post has a progress bar (that is the blue horizontal bar), and that bar is about 40% of the total. If that took around 4 hours, then the total scan should take around 10 hours, so 6 more hours to go (well, maybe).

In the UK, each terrestrial transmitter broadcasts on 6-8 frequencies. MP contains a set of "tuning parameters" files, with a separate file for each transmitter. Each file lists only those frequencies used by that transmitter. Consequently, MP scans only those 6-8 frequencies, and the whole scan takes only a couple of minutes. However, there is also an "all regions" file, which causes MP to scan every single frequency in the UHF band, which of course takes much longer.

I have looked in the following folder to see if there are equivalent files for cable:

C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal TV Server\TuningParameters\atsc\

There are only 5 files, all with names beginning "QAM", and they are all about the same size. Looking at the content indicates that they all seem to contain every possible frequency, from the minimum to the maximum. The file "QAM Standard.xml" contains 158 frequencies.

It may be that it really does take 10 hours to scan 158 frequencies, but that seems improbable to me. One possibility (and I am not an expert) is that MP is taking much longer than normal for each frequency because it is unable to understand the data that it is receiving. It seems to be taking 3-4 minutes for each frequency, which might be the size of the timeout that MP uses for each frequency it scans. If MP were able to understand the data, it could probably process each frequency in a few seconds. MP may be unable to understand the data because it is encypted to DRM standards (as I mentioned in an earlier post).

What to do? Well, if you knew at least one frequency of a channel that was not encrypted (e.g. a local free-to-air channel that is included in your cable package), you could delete all entries from the "QAM Standard.xml" file except for that known frequency, and try scanning that single frequency. Copy the file to a new file called "My QAM Standard.xml" and then edit that to delete the unwanted frequencies. MP will list it in the drop-down so that you can select it for the scan.

How to determine the frequency to scan? Knowing the frequencies used by cable providers seems highly specialised, so possibly not available on a web page somewhere (but it might be worthwhile spending a little time looking). Alternatively, if your WMC setup is still usable, navigate to the channel info panel where it should display the tuning data, including the frequency (it does for terrestrial, so I am assuming that it will for cable too). Then use that frequency in the file "My QAM Standard.xml" and see if the scan can receive that channel.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[Old school Bob]

Thanks CyberSimian.
It's after 5 AM and it's done scanning. Started before 6 PM. (11 hours).





Still all the channels show red. like before. I gotta get some sleep now.

I'll look for a not encrypted chanel tomorrow.

Long day - thanks for helping.

Bob

 

[TLD]

Before you do any more scanning, click on "TV Channels" and remove all the red channels.
You can click on the first channel to highlight it then hold the shift key and scroll down and click another channel to select as many channels as you like, to remove multiple channels at once.

 

[CyberSimian]

It's after 5 AM and it's done scanning. Started before 6 PM. (11 hours).

Your screen shot shows that at the end of the scan, MP had found 2746 new channels, and updated 106464 existing channels. So MP already had over 100K channels in its database.

I don't know how MP handles cable channels, but possibly you should have deleted all of the existing channels before performing a scan. The earlier screen shot shows that there are apparently 10 definitions for the channel "Game 14 HD". Is it possible that over the past few days you have started scanning 10 times (even if you did not allow the scan to complete)?

I think that MP ought to be able to recognise that a channel found during the scan matches an existing channel in its database, so normally you don't need to delete the existing channels. But the fact that all of these channels appear to be red may indicate that MP cannot identify the channel found during the scan, and so cannot match it with an existing channel.

I think that I would still suggest looking at the channel info in WMC for a channel that works, creating a "My QAM Standard.xml" file containing just that frequency, and seeing if MP can find it during the scan. With only one frequency, the scan should complete in a few seconds if successful, and in 3-4 minutes if not successful (no more waiting 11 hours for the scan to complete).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

 

[joecrow]

Before you do any more scanning, click on "TV Channels" and remove all the red channels.
You can click on the first channel to highlight it then hold the shift key and scroll down and click another channel to select as many channels as you like, to remove multiple channels at once.

No need to do that just click on the button in the screenshot below.

 

[TLD]

No need to do that just click on the button in the screenshot below.

View attachment 206471

Yes i forgot about that button, it's been a long time since i have had to scan for channels.

 

[TLD]

I had a idea last night that it is possible that the cable card you got from your cable company may act as a set top box, if that is the case you may be able to cerate your channels with simply the channel number you would enter on a remote control. I think this is worth a try, I will post a little later today what I'm thinking of.