Mapping digital channels to EPG channels

[DreadFury]

Mapping is annoying, but not that hard.

I have 63 clear QAM channels I am using (I have over 90 available in Southern California through Time Warner, but a bunch are ones I have absolutely no interest in)

What I did was hook up my tv to normal cable, then after scanning the channels in gbpvr, i went down the list of channels in the preview window.
If I came to a channel that was clear, I looked for the tv stations logo in the bottom corner.
If this logo was not there, i would then flip through the channels on my TV using the actual cabel until the screens matched eachother.
This told me the correct channel.

I wrote these channels down on paper, I did not configure anything yet.

Once I had a full list of channels (took about an hour of casual writing, i wasn't even grinding on it or anything) I went in and mapped the channels accordingly.

Then, I kept my list.

I have had to re-map twice already because of various reasons, but with my list it took me only about 10-15minutes to remap them all. (again casual, I wasn't grinding)

Good luck.

[mmatheny]

How do you tell from the preview window if it is HD or not? I don't even know if I have my system set up properly to tune HD! I posted my capture sources before (http://forums.gbpvr.com/showpost.php?p=3...stcount=10), and asked if it looked correct - no one has responded yet.

[whurlston]

There is no real way to tell from the preview window if it is HD or SD. If the stream happens to have the channel name, you can tell from that.

[mmatheny]

I am so frustrated right now I about to pull my hair out! I ran you're util and did a rescan. I found what appears to be NBC-HD, so I scroll down to that channel, and the darn channel I found it on in the right panel doesn't appear in the dropdown in the left panel! What the he!! is going on here?? I must be missing something!

[mmatheny]

There is no real way to tell from the preview window if it is HD or SD. If the stream happens to have the channel name, you can tell from that.

Do my capture sources seem to be set up right?

[whurlston]

Yeah, they appear to be right in that screen. Zip and post your config*.log files after running a scan.

[mmatheny]

OK another question - are you all trying to say that there is NO standard as to what frequency a channel is on and what it's channel number is? OR does this only apply to cable channels? Why when I tune my HDTV into a channel on my cable using it's HDTV tuner can't I tun the same channel # on GBPVR to get it? Does the cable companies send down some kind of channel to frequency mapping? If so, why can't GBPBR read it like my HDTV can?

[SLR_65]

From what I gather on cable they can put any channel anywhere they want to. When you use their cable box they do indeed talk to it and tell it where all the channels are at. Unfortunately the way they talk to the box is proprietary and probably encrypted so GBPVR has no way to process that data to emulate what the cable box does.

If your TV has a clear qam tuner in it it'll probably find the channels in the same spot your pc tuner card will.

Clear qam is a frustrating animal sometimes. I think it was designed to simply replace clear analog but the cable cos are seeing the oppertunity to snooker us into needing a box for every tuner - more equipment means more money for them and less convenience for us!

[mmatheny]

Thanx for the input! I hate that I feel so dense here regarding this! Someone said that the commercial programs like BeyondTV the user has to do the same thing manually - but I looked at some of their forums, and it seems the TV Guide data they get down is specific to zip code (as is SchedulesDirect) but seems to add some additional info as to what your local cable carrier is and what digital channel maps to what physical channel number! Maybe I misread, maybe someone that has tried BeyondTV can chime in!

[whurlston]

They only have the physical channel and the corresponding virtual channel for OTA. For digital cable, they only have the digital cable channel number (the same as someone would see on their STB). Digital cable channel numbers are not the same as the physical channel number. I have a digital cable channel of 906 which is on physical channel 72. The virtual channel is 3.1, which is seen in the channel name because it is sent as part of the PSIP information in the video stream. My channel 912 (physical channel 80) however, does not contain it's virtual channel (34.1) in the PSIP data.

With BeyondTV, you have to do the same thing you do with GBPVR where you map the channels but you have to do it online on your BTV account, where with GBPVR, it's done in the local database. All your copies of BTV then pull that mapping. The mapping that you do is only available to the BTV installs that connect to your account.