well I get several channels, but I've only gone through all the work for abc nbc cbs fox upn wb since 95% of the shows I watch are on those channels. My big thing is since I moved OTA was VERY unreliable to the point I had disconnected it. I will create some sort of better writeup once 0.19 is out since some of the stuff I did requires the newer SVN version from A22 or 0.19

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Xsecrets

This is a great guide. I have gotten farther than ever before in fixing the hdtv issue. I have viewed video caputured off of the card with mplayer. I started to follow the guide from there and am having problems.

When I enter mysql -u root -p mythconverg, I get a request for password. I hit enter and get to the mysql monitor. When I type in the select command I get an output like above. The difference is that it does not have any of the data from my channels.conf file. It only has the channels from the zap 2 it retrieval. How to I get that data into mysql.


Rkshack

well he did a channel scan which will put basically the same information as the channels.conf file into the database, however if you are on Comcast and any version of knoppmyth other than R5A22 it will not since the current versions of mythtv will not enter any information if there is not psid information. If you happen to be running R5A22 or have upgraded to a newer SVN version of mythtv you have two options.
1) the scan will pick up channels even if they don't have psid.
2) you can import the information from your channels.conf file. (this is what I did, because I cleaned that file up and only had the channels I wanted before I imported it.)

These are the reasons I said I would do a writeup on getting the comcast stuff working after 0.19 version of mythtv is released. I happen to still be on R5A22 on my main box so it worked for me, however I don't want to go encouraging people to go back to R5A22 since there may still be some upgrade issues to future versions.

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Xsecrets

Is there not a way to import channels.conf with R5A30_1?

Is it definite that .19 will add channels without psid?

If it will add channels without psid, would that not get rid of the need for using atscscan?

no

not sure, all I know is the accidental SVN version from A22 will.

sort of I found it easier to use atscscan then edit it and import it so I didn't get a bunch of channels I don't want, and can't find guide data for.

besides atscscan allows you to find and test the channels before you have added any unnecessary stuff to the database.

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Xsecrets

Okay, the gold star goes to whomever can explain this....

Just for the heck of it, I connected my antenna back up to my Air2PC dvb. (I had it hooked up this way before, but swtiched to my cable input after reading the original post in this thread.) I did the atscscan using us-ATSC... (instead of the QAM256 one) and it found 17 channels. Wonderful. So, I azap'ed one of them (using the -r option this time - thanks Xsecrets for drawing my attention to that - I should learn to read better!) and cat the output to a file.

Well the azap showed the same results, only this time my signal was 0000 and my snr was FFFF. That did not seem promising at all:



So imagine my surprise when I ran mplayer on the output.mpeg file only to discover a perfect 30 second recording!?!?!? I tried some other channels - same thing!

Now I am completely confused. Why am I getting these 0000 and FFFF signals but somehow I'm actually tuning a channel (and very clearly too)? Very odd. So my next step is to hook cable back up and try it that way again.

As an add-on question - would Myth see a 0000 signal and just "assume" there's no station when trying to Watch live TV (even though, apparently, there is)? I'm not an expert on Myth yet, so I don't know if that's a dumb question or not. I'm also going to try and record on the dvb card using the Myth frontend and see what happens. I'll post my results. In the meantime, if someone has an explanation (or even a wild guess) for what I'm seeing, I'm all ears.

(If I'm starting to veer too far off topic here, someone please say so - thanks.)

Heres a break down of AZAP
Azap was designed mainly for OTA Transmissions So Signal is for OTA Signal Status hence it Would always be NULL for Clear QAM Cable

Next is SNR = Signal to Noise Ratio : It's about how much interference is in the connection
To under stand the complexities of it read more about it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio
This funtion is not supported by all drivers of HD-Cards.

BER is Bit Error Rate. So if you have activity here it means your signal is sending some bad bits (Bad/Weak signal,Traffic overflow, )

if you have constant activity in the UNC column ( A.K.A "uncorrectable errors") it means your hardware or drivers are having issues.

*info from mythtv_users mailing list and mythtv.org doc's along with my personal experiences

Thanks, that's good info. I love trying to decipher acronyms!

The strange thing is that whether I've got cable (QAM) or an OTA antenna hooked up, my signal is always showing 0000. Odd thing is, I have managed to get several very clear OTA channels to tune! (yet azap still reports 0000 signal strength). I'm not sure what to make of that. But at least now I'm tuning channels on OTA... so I'll probably just work with that for a while until I feel adventurous again.

But for the record I did try hooking up the cable again and azap'ing some of the QAM channels that (supposedly) atscscan found. No luck. After cat'ing the dvb output to a file, the file was very small (around 500k) and, according to mplayer, "contained no video or audio". I tried it on 5 or 6 different stations - same result every time. Some day I'll go through all 30 of them just to confirm they all behave the same way...

XSecrets, can you explain (or point me to an explanation) of what tables in the database the channel scan writes to?

I have RCN in Boston and the channel scan adds no channels probably because the channel names are not included in the signal.

But using the instructions in the first post, I can find 20 or 30 channels. So I need to add these to the database manualy to get around the broken channel scan.

Thanks for any help,
Jim

jimooo, I posted yesterday an explanation of how to manually enter channels into the database - there are three tables that you need to touch. The post is at:

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8521

Scott

samilliken, Thanks for that info! I was able to update my database although I didn't change the freqID that was mentioned in the first post on this thread.

In any case, I can now see live HD TV on my myth PC.

Now on to the next problem. Most channels seem to be displaying at half speed. 1 or two HD channels work mostly ok but the rest do not. Most of the standard def channels are at half speed too.

Thanks again

Got my new HD-5000, hooked up to Comcast cable, here in Washington. I ran the ASTC (QAM256) scan, and got a PILE of channels. No really. a BIG pile. And every last one of them are tunable (FE_HAS_LOCK, etc) when I test with AZAP.

[root@frontend3 ~]# azap -a0 [0007]
using '/dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0' and '/dev/dvb/adapter0/demux0'
tuning to 519000000 Hz
video pid 0x0a01, audio pid 0x0a00
status 00 | signal 0000 | snr 0000 | ber 00000000 | unc 0000ffff |
status 1f | signal 0000 | snr ff20 | ber 00000000 | unc 0000ffff | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 0000 | snr ff23 | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 0000 | snr ff29 | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK
status 1f | signal 0000 | snr ff2b | ber 00000000 | unc 00000000 | FE_HAS_LOCK

[root@frontend3 ~]# wc -l channels.conf
342 channels.conf

Not home where I can view output, but each one makes a non-zero-sized file when I cat to a file.

Is this right? This seems like both ASTC and NTSC channels..

If I remember correctly I could not get a lock using [????] either try renaming a few to someting like tst01 instead of [0001] and see if you get channel lock. also don't forget my note about using the -r switch with azap when cating to a file if you don't use it you will get a 0byte file.

and yes I got a bunch of stuff I'm not sure if it was 300, but probably at least 100. remember all the music is pushed over qam as well. I know because I was able to pick up most of them using my hdtv's internal tuner, not sure if myth will handle them since they don't have video.

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Xsecrets

I agree with Xsecrets. Using the [####] name did not work for me. After I renamed it to something else, it worked.

[for reference I have one of the new Air2PC HD-5000 cards]

For what it's worth, I walked through almost all of the 342 channels found in my QAM256 scan... and guess what?

I'm getting SD and HD over QAM256. I'm getting almost all the non-HD channels comcast sends. couple seem to be too weak a signal, and since none of them send station IDs, I was playing 'match the station' for several hours last night.

I love this card.... however, since CBS/Comcast can't seem to work it out up here, I'm going to go with 8VSB/antenna instead. Can't stand SD-cbs.