HDHomerun, channel scan, Zap2it, and Sage Guide problems

[mitchedo]

Hi there,

I'm bound and determined to make SageTV work for me. I've had quite the struggles for 2 months now to where I almost sent back my unopened HD300's. I haven't been able to get the server PC running Sage the way I'd like, so I haven't even opened the HD300's. Granted, I wasted a lot of time with various bad beta versions that crashed, reinstalled Win7 multiple times, had a defective power supply, yadda yadda yadda -- but now that SageTV 7 is released, it's going to work, right?

I have a pair of HDHomeruns receiving plain old antenna off-air in the Salt Lake City market. When I do the HDHomerun channel scan, all the channels look great. Fine.

When I set up SageTV, the channels get all messed up. There are extra channels I don't receive; the channels I do receive get remapped to the wrong channel, etc. For example, the CW station has the proper Zap2it ID number, but it was mapped to the wrong physical channel in SageTV. I manually changed it, but it's such a hassle. In the guide, it was getting the CW program information, displaying the wrong channel number, and it had no signal. The guide was showing NO DATA for the CW station that displayed the right channel number and did get the signal. Obviously, my recordings didn't work.

Is there a way to set up my channels so they don't get all messed up?

I'm using SageTV 7 (last beta) on Win7 pro64.

[Opus4]

For OTA HDHR setup on Windows, the only scan that matters is the one done in SageTV. Are you scanning both tuners in SageTV and then remapping them to their correct stations?

- Andy

[Brent94Z]

I had some trouble understanding the concept to setup the HDHR. Did you happen to read through this thread? It got me going in the right direction.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=51485

Are you missing doing the very important step of making the channels in the HDHR software MACTH your Zap2it guide info? It took me about 1.5 hours to figure out what channel was what and fix the channels but if you do that, Sage should not have a problem mapping things correctly. The hard part is YOU have to do the mapping to the correct channel in the HDHR software and that can take a little time

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Brent94Z

Are you missing doing the very important step of making the channels in the HDHR software MACTH your Zap2it guide info? It took me about 1.5 hours to figure out what channel was what and fix the channels but if you do that, Sage should not have a problem mapping things correctly. The hard part is YOU have to do the mapping to the correct channel in the HDHR software and that can take a little time

He said he's using OTA tuning. SageTV only uses the mapping done in the HDHR software when using QAM tuning.

For OTA, you only need to scan & remap in SageTV. (You can scan OTA channels using the HDHR software to see what it finds, but those results won't carry over to SageTV.)

- Andy

[Brent94Z]

Originally Posted by Opus4

He said he's using OTA tuning. SageTV only uses the mapping done in the HDHR software when using QAM tuning.

For OTA, you only need to scan & remap in SageTV. (You can scan OTA channels using the HDHR software to see what it finds, but those results won't carry over to SageTV.)

- Andy

Thanks for the correction, Andy. I should stick to what I do best... asking questions instead of answering them. LOL

[elefante]

I came to sage from beyondtv and it took me a while to get it working, however I have worked out a repeatable method for HDHR.

1. Install the latest HDHR firmware and app on the to be sagetv server.
2. Run the channel scan on HDHR Setup app. Make sure main application in SageTV.
3. Under tuners tab, make sure in your case Digital Antenna is selected for all tuners.
3. Go to digital cable/antenna tab and run a scan. As others have mentioned it doesn't matter to sage, however you can see what physical channels should be found (and this is VERY useful for later). Click on view to see if they work, and make sure you pick out the appropriate substation you want.
4. Go to silicondust under support and put in your zipcode and it will come up with the OTA channels (virt and phys in your area). Make sure they match, and choose the right one (some are SD, some are HD, etc) the page will tell you the native resolution.
5. Write down the physical channel and subchannel (taken from tune column in HDHR app above), and the station name.
6. Go to sagetv and do the scan. Some channels will not map correctly, but since you already have the channels picked out, you are golden. If some you are seeing in HDHR scan do not come up in sagetv scan, then you may have reception issues to deal with.
7. At this point you have the choice of using the HD station names like WxxxDT, or their regular names (since my wife doesn't know, I used the regular station names.

8. To do that however you have to manually enter these in SageTV setup, however it is easy and you only have to do it once.

Go to sage-> setup -> setup video sources, and click on one of the tuners. Select channel setup. Ones that will show up in your guide have green dots on them. If you want to use the low channels (4 letter station name), choose the channel say channel 18 (in my case WPXJ), and click on remap channel. Click on remap channel, and you want to change physical channel. The physical channel is that number you wrote down from the HDHR gui. In my case it maps to channel 112-4, HOWEVER sage uses a weird convention so you have to enter the phys channel twice, so it will look like 112-112-4.

Make sure the green dot (enabled) is chosen for the channel, and voila you are done. I only have a single HDHR, and I only had to map the channels once (only one of the 2 tuners), with 2 HDHR I'm not sure.

My setup was a little different because I run my sagetv server in a VM (previews under RDP didn't work), until I installed View.

In any case this has been stable for over a year.

HTH.

[hemicuda]

I just switched over to a provider running IPTV (or some flavor of it) and had to ditch my QAM setup in favor of ATSC. The HDHR GUI app shows that I have great signal strength/quality on all the local affiliates, PBS, CW, and Fox. I even pick up another CW affiliate some 70mi away off the back of the antenna (go figure).

The problem is when I do a channel scan in SageTV. It says that only NBC, ABC, and CBS are tunable. I tried to remap one of the missing channels by following the pattern of an existing station; no luck. It would be so much easier if things worked like QAM with .scn files from SiliconDust. Heck, even the HDHR software that generates the .scn file for QAM finds more channels than Sage. What's with that?

[hemicuda]

Now I'm really

My HVR1800 is refusing to detect ANY OTA channels even when I take out the splitter and tie it straight to the wall plate. Could there be a digital switch I forgot to flip when I changed from QAM to OTA? I'm going to copy the .frq from the HDHR scan and see if that helps any.

Edit: should the Broadcast Standard in Source Setup be listed as "QAM" even though I picked Antenna from the lineup selection?

Edit2: ok, I feel dumb. went back and looked at the properties file and it said QAM. Removed the tuner, cleared out that section in sage.properties, added the tuner. now it's showing ATSC in sage.properties and tuning channels. sheesh. I must have forced that last time or the server decided it wasn't going to change it.