Mapping digital channels to EPG channels

[mmatheny]

New HVR2250 owner here.
OK - I'm a little stumped here - am I supposed to GUESS what digital channels map to the call sign/DVR display on my cable DVR??? 300 channels?? Is there any website that CORRECTLY shows digital to DVR channel mappings for areas (I'm in Houston south side Comcast, and I've googled for hours, and NOTHING is even close to accurate - at least as to what channels are showing up in the Tuning Request dropdown!).

Thanx for any help.

[sub]

Yes, you need to guess (or rather work it out yourself). There is not enough information in the stream for GB-PVR to do this mapping for you. Watch a channel in the preview window to work out what it is, then find its in the channel list and perform the mapping. You can click on the preview window to get a large version, click again for small.

In reality most QAM users have less than a couple of dozen unencrypted channels, so you only to do those, not all 300 it found during the scan (which are mostly encrypted). Most only get the few local channels.

[mmatheny]

So - the "channels" it finds - are those actually frequencies? Because on my cable QAM, I get NBC on 2, and NBCHD on 2-1 - and there IS not 2-1 in the channel scan. Same for ABCHD - it's on 86-3 (according to the QAM tuner in my TV) and again, there IS NO 86-3 in the scan!

[sub]

So - the "channels" it finds - are those actually frequencies?

With QAM the channels can be pretty much any frequency. For example, on NBC might be on RF channel 92.

If its not finding some channels, you might need to try scanning some other frequencies. See whurlston's qam.ini manager.

[mmatheny]

With QAM the channels can be pretty much any frequency. For example, on NBC might be on RF channel 92.

If its not finding some channels, you might need to try scanning some other frequencies. See whurlston's qam.ini manager.

I downloaded that program, and it doesn't do a thing no matter which button I press!

[mmatheny]

How do the commercial programs like SageTV and BeyondTV do? Surely they don't expect their customers to have to go through this! And more of my analog channels are being mapped to a digital channel, so I need to go through more than "a couple of dozen unencrypted channels" to get all my channels mapped!

[sub]

How do the commercial programs like SageTV and BeyondTV do? Surely they don't expect their customers to have to go through this!

They require users to manually map things aswell. The streams do not contain any info that can be used to automatically do the mapping to the EPG. They names are usually not present in the stream, or if they are then they're often not an exact match, and there is no channel numbers etc.

And more of my analog channels are being mapped to a digital channel, so I need to go through more than "a couple of dozen unencrypted channels" to get all my channels mapped!

What do you mean? You dont need to map analog channels, only the unencrypted clear qam channels you receive. You can ignore all the channels you dont receive unencrypted, and they'll be disabled when you ok out of the mapping screen.

How many clear QAM channels do you receive?

[mmatheny]

Quite a few - Comcast is making room for more HD, so they are moving all the analog channels to digital channels and opening up bandwidth. Plan is to have no analog channels by next year sometime.

[whurlston]

Quite a few - Comcast is making room for more HD, so they are moving all the analog channels to digital channels and opening up bandwidth. Plan is to have no analog channels by next year sometime.

Are they all unencrypted though? Most cable providers will only provide the local channels in clear (unencrypted) QAM. All other channels are usually encrypted. I have about 60 QAM channels (150 if you count the music only) but I can only view about 10 of them (my locals).

[mmatheny]

Is this right for capture card setup? I cannot figure out how I got the two digital tuners set up with the BDA recording plugin - is that right? Plus, even when pvrx2 isn't running, the status shows a show recording on an analog tuner that I didn't schedule (heck, I haven't even got the darn thing where I can watch the channels I want yet!)