QAM Channel Remapping

[scoful]

After completely remapping my approximately 170 QAM channels for the 3rd time in 6 months I'm hoping someone has some pointers to make this easier.

I have 3 hauppauge QAM tuners with a common lineup. Thanks to Silicon Dust's online listings I don't have to do much trial and error for what's what.

Unfortunately the whole process of remapping channels is extremely tedious. Not to mention it's prone to human error.

Unless I'm missing something here - after remapping a channel I am taken back to the list of channels and the channel I just remapped to the location I remapped it to. While I kind of understand this, it would be far more productive to be returned to the next (not remapped) channel in the list.

Also, I can press a number to skip around in the list of channels to map to, but can't use letters (for call letters). Unfortunately my cable provider has virtually all of the HD channels in the 200 range. My raw digital channels have a crapload of channels in the 20's - so pressing '2' fifty times really doesn't help.

The other mystery to me is the fact that there are really three different channel numbers - a number Sage assigns - like 27-9 - which is really 27.10 and is then remapped to 218. I'm not sure what the first number is, but it's frequently the same, but not always the same as the real QAM number that's listed on Silicon Dust's website. If the first set of numbers wasn't there at all it would be easier to deal with.

Ideally Sage would be setup to use an online service (Silicon Dust's?) to maintain a substitution table automatically, but it would also be nice if it could just use a CSV so that it could be edited manually.

Anybody have any tips for how they're doing this?

[doncote0]

No much help here. Most of mine is done automatically. HDHR sees the change and incorporates the update. Sage see the update and automatically enables it (and notifies me).

When Comcast first went digital, I went through many changes due to Comcast trying to figure out how best to do business. Most of that has stopped.

For me, the process is not tedious. I do most of the manual stuff from a PC. For a comparison, imagine trying to enter an entire URL manually using a remote. That would be pretty inefficient and frustrating now wouldn't it?

[scoful]

For real? Nobody but me has to remap channels?

[heatvent]

I remap but don't really have much advice. I think there are multiple things at play here. There is a lot coming through my comcast line that needs to be cleaned up DTV stations which appear to be radio, some stations are in there multiple times which I think is the digital version and the OTA version and the channel numbers don't line up very neatly. I spend time fixing these issues just like you do. I am not sure of the best practices but I am in the same boat is you.

[Tiki]

I do the remapping inside the HDHR setup, before I run the scan in Sage.
It works best if you avoid the dashes and dots in the channel #s and just stick with regular numbers. I map everything the way my cable provider maps it (so for example channel 7.1 shows up as channel 231 on my cable box, so I map it to 231 in the HDHR software and then when I do the scan in Sage, it shows up as 231 and I don't have to re-map anything in Sage).

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Tiki

I do the remapping inside the HDHR setup, before I run the scan in Sage.
It works best if you avoid the dashes and dots in the channel #s and just stick with regular numbers. I map everything the way my cable provider maps it (so for example channel 7.1 shows up as channel 231 on my cable box, so I map it to 231 in the HDHR software and then when I do the scan in Sage, it shows up as 231 and I don't have to re-map anything in Sage).

Exactly what I do. Get the HDHR setup correctly and then there is nothing to do in Sage.

[heatvent]

I unfortunately do not have the HDHR so I have to do in Sage. tmiranda/tiki, how does this work with the HVR-2250 that you both seem to use as well. When you scan those encoders, do you remap or is this somehow now understood by Sage?

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by heatvent

I unfortunately do not have the HDHR so I have to do in Sage. tmiranda/tiki, how does this work with the HVR-2250 that you both seem to use as well. When you scan those encoders, do you remap or is this somehow now understood by Sage?

Honestly, I haven't had to change anything since the first time I set-up the 2250, and it's been so long I can't remember exactly what I did. I do remember it took me most of a day to get it working in the first place though. One thing I do remember is that the QAM scanning in Sage didn't work the first couple times I tried it - I had to restart the Sage Service at least twice (and possibly re-boot the PC) before it actually started scanning for real. I think I did go through and manually re-map everything through the Sage interface, but I can't remember for sure.

One other thing I remember was that Sage mis-identified the HVR2250 as ATSC instead of QAM, even though I told it I was using digital cable during the setup. I had to manually edit something in the Sage.properties file to get it to work (I think it was the line "mmc/encoders/######/broadcast_standard=QAM", for some reason it set itself to "ATSC").

I also know that after I got things working, I compared the *.FRQ files from the HVR2250 to the HDHR. I found that the prog:, phy:, frq:, and inv: entries matched for all the channels. With the HDHR, the major: field was always 1008 and the minor: field was the logical channel number. But with the HVR2250, the major: and minor: field combined to create the logical channel (if major: was 7 and minor: was 2, the logical channel was 7.2). Also, with the HDHR, mod: was always 0, but with the HVR2250, mod: was always 11. Finally, the last entry in each row, #: was the label for the channels. In the HDHR, these labels all matched the Zap2It channel names, but in the HVR2250, they were all a little bit different.

Based on that, I suspect that I could have just edited the .frq files to make them look like the HDHR files and everything would have just worked without doing all the remapping in Sage. However, I have not really tested this theory (I'm not sure when Sage reads the frq files).

[scoful]

I wish there was an option to use a simple substitution table:

Lineup Channel/QAM Channel
254/50-3
255/66-1

AND

If the Lineup Channel isn't listed in the table it isn't enabled in Sage.

That way the same EPG lineup could be used for all tuners without having to make a copy for the QAM tuners to disable those not available.

If this were available I would imagine someone could write a utility (perhaps even me) that would pull the substitutions from Silicon Dust's website and automatically keep things up to date for any QAM tuner.