All Channels Unknown

[CKane]

Hi all. Really hoping to find some help with this. Im using this, Asus PCI- Express Television Tuner MY CINEMA-EHC3-150/NAQ/FM/AV/RC on windows 7 ultimate, with a cable line connected to my htpc directly from the wall jack. I do not have a cable box, as we pay for what is referred to as "Starter Cable".

Nextpvr scans and finds plenty of channels. But all of them show up as unknown. If it helps we are in northeast ohio. Is there a way to make this work correctly, or somewhere I can find a list so I can re label the channels manually? This also seems to be causing there to be no epg data either.

Thanks to anyone who can take the time to help with this.

[johnsonx42]

assuming you are scanning QAM (digital) the cable company usually doesn't provide any channel name data in the stream; before my cable went encrypted, I'd get channel names for a couple of channels but the bulk of them showed up as "unknown". their cable boxes get the data from a proprietary stream.

you won't get any EPG data from the cable company. use Schedules Direct. Just go to Settings->Channels and double-click the first channel. Select Schedules Direct as the EPG source, and you should get a prompt to go to the website and setup an account. (edit: actually the link to setting up SD comes after you select "Manage lineups..." in the next field. or you can just go straight to http://www.schedulesdirect.org now; don't setup any lineups at the SD website; all lineup and channel selection is done within the NPVR channels screen)

once you've setup Schedules Direct and mapped one channel, it will try to auto-map the rest of the channels for you but I don't know if it will be able to do anything without channel names.

you may have no alternative but to simply watch each channel live until you can figure out what it is. the ancient technology used by your forefathers known as "paper and pencil" will be helpful here. (edit: I'd forgotten that you can set the EPG source while watching each channel as sub pointed out below, so there may be no need for paper and pencil)

silicon dust used to have a channel database you could consult, but it seems to be defunct. it often wasn't all that accurate anyway.

[sub]

Unfortunately with digital cable in the US, they're not required to transmit the channel names or channel numbers or epg info in the stream, so usually they don't include this information. In effect, there is no way for NextPVR to know this info, so it has to mark them as unknown. There is pretty much nothing you can do about this other than watch the channel for a bit, then right click and select the 'Set Channel EPG Source' menu option. This will show a screen where you can edit the channel name, number or EPG.

For an EPG, most people in the North America use the Schedules Direct service. mc2xml is another fairly common option.

[CKane]

@johnsonx42 Lol, what is this "Paper and Pencil" you speak of? Is that similar to a keyboard and mouse? Jk

Honestly, Thank you both so much for your help. I set everything up 3 days ago, and have been trying to figure it out since then. I think I tried every pvr that I could find that was compatible with kodi/xbmc, and didn't care for any of them other than Nextpvr. If doing it all manually is the way it needs to be done, that is perfectly fine with me. Just glad it can be done. The EPG was something that was really throwing me off, as I wasn't sure how that really worked. But the both of you cleared it pretty well for me, and I thank you greatly for that.