I have been bashing away at a line-up/grabber problem with the digital channels on my R5E50 box.

With the help of marc.aronson I have been using webmin to analyze my DB to try to spot a problem which might explain a possible grabber failure resulting in no program information for most of my digital channels.

Marc has spotted that although for the analogue channels, the 'chanid' encodes the channel number and the source id, this is not the case for the digital channels. Marc is not running R5E50 and so I am wondering if this is indicative of a problem, or just something which has changed for R5E50.

Some examples: (mysql values, determined using webmin)

Analogue channels:

channum 21, sourceid 1, chanid 1021
channum 11, sourceid 1, chanid 1011

Digital channels:

channum 171, sourceid 2, chanid 2601
channum 175, sourceid 2, chanid 2612

I have been to the zap2it.com site and selected the lineup corresponding to the digital service for my area and I can see that the 'xmltvid' values are correct, so from that I would conclude that it did download the correct lineup.

example ..

(look for the 'getSingleStation#stnNum' value)

Examples..

CH171 mysql value = 20290
Hyperlink on zap2it.com ..

http://tvlistings5.zap2it.com/tvlisting ... ingleStati
on&stnNum=20290&lineupId=0009080:X&zipcode=V4M3&channel=171

CH175 mysql value = 19601

http://tvlistings5.zap2it.com/tvlisting ... ingleStati
on&stnNum=19601&lineupId=0009080:X&zipcode=V4M3&channel=175


Could someone please advise as to whether the channum anomaly with the digital channels does in fact point to my problem?

I have tried deleting the capture cards and adding them back in. I have tried deleting the channels and channel source and adding them back in but nothing seems to help.

Finally, one thing which Marc said to find out, and I wonder if anyone on this forum can advise ..

> > Carefully re-read the instructions for doing the R5E50 setup
> > (assuming they exist) to see which you are supported to do first:
> > Scan the digital channels OR create the video source & download the
> > channel lineup from zap2it. I suspect that you need to create the
> > video source AND do a download of the channel lineup before you do any scanning.

<EDIT> one other thing I have noticed is that for some of the digital channels, for the 'tvformat' field this is blank, whereas for a few of them it is shown as 'Default'. Maybe this is a problem?

BTW all the above mysql data is taken from the 'channel' table in the DB.

thanks,

Kevin

First, don't do a channel scan if you use zap2itlabs or download the channel lineup. Channel scans mess up the db. At least they did historically. If you did a channel scan, you may need to delete the cards and add them back.

Second, zap2itlabs is having some problems right now with program information not showing correctly. At least for a number of us, we're seeing results from them that state a show is a rerun when it's not and the description isn't correct either.

Third, would a direct xml dump help you out at all? The site has some code available that will grab the xml source for the program listings and dump it to a file for you.

http://bb.labs.zap2it.com/viewtopic.php?t=45

The thread in that has a very useful vbscript app you can run to dump the xml. You just need to wrap it with script tags and you can run it in IE. Alternatively, you can grab some of the other code there and compile it.

borgednow,

sorry if it's a stupid question but much of this is still new to me but how would a script which does a direct xml dump running on a windows box help me out?

As regards the channel scan, as I understand it I have no choice but to do it this way as my HD capture card is tuning clear-QAM channels and it tunes them as 58#0, 62#1, etc, it does not see them as the real channel number (i.e. 171, 173, etc)

Kevin

Dumping the xml source would verify that the channel lineups are accessable to your machine.

I don't know much about the digital stuff, but I know that in previous versions, doing a download AND doing a channel scan will futz everything up.

If you are getting the download channels for both analog and digital from zap2it, I'm not sure why you'd need to do a scan at all.

But like I said, I don't know much about digital channels.

borgednow,
I will take a look at that script, I can see now how it would be useful.

Regarding the downloading and doing a channel scan ..

this is defintely a no-no, but for analogue tuners only. Actually I fell into this trap with my PVR-500 card and tjc put me straight on that one. From what I have read, and what tjc told me previsously I do need to do the scan on my HD card.

What I am not sure about though is if I should also 'get the listings from source' for the HD/digital channels.

I have two separate lineups set up on zap2it, one I reference to for my PVR-500 (analogue card) and the other I reference to for my HD card, this is how tjc advised me to set it up.

Kevin

Kevin, just wanted to be sure you were aware of these two artices over in the mythtv wiki:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Fr ... nel_Editor

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Ad ... uner_Cards

If you can't get things working using the approach outlined in the first article (which is the one that should work for R5E50), you might try the method outlined in the second article. While the second article is describing a methodology designed for R5D1, I suspect it is still worth a try on R5E50.

Marc

thanks Marc,

I have read those two articles, the first one is the one I have been following up til now to enter the real channel numbers for the digital channels from my clear-QAM tuner.

The sencond one I was a bit perplexed about, I couldn't figure out what was still applicable to my R5E50 system.

As mentioned earlier do you think my problem could be that the 'chanid' field is still wahat was originally set when I first did the scan of the QAM-256 channels? i.e. ..

I wonder if this is the problem ..


When I first scan the channels on my Airstar card they show up in the lineup as
follows:

60#0
60#1
61#0
61#1
etc, etc

I then watch each of the channels and figure out (by comparing to what I see on my TV connected to my Motorola box) what is the *real* channel number. I then use the channel editor (press 'e' while watching live TV) and enter the correct channel number, then hit the 'probe' button to populate all the other fields.

So, let me write down the above channels, but this time I will add the *real* channel number alongside ..

60#0 Ch 170
60#1 Ch 171
61#0 Ch 173
61#1 Ch 174

Now, if I follow the 'encoding' rules you told me about, given that these all use source ID of 2, then the 'chanid' would look like ..

2600
2601
2610
2611

.. Which is exactly what I see when I look at the channel table using webmin!!

So, from this I would conclude that the problem is the channel editor in R5E50 not doing a complete job, it needs to also update the 'chanid'. As you pointed out, the 'chanid' should really look like ..

2170
2171
2173
2174

Question is, how do I fix this up?

Can I modify these values manually using webmin?

Kevin

I have fixed up the channel table so that the 'chanid' now looks like:

2170 (for ch170)
2171 (for ch171)
2173 (for ch173)
etc

I also filled in the missing 'tvformat' fields, setting them to 'Default' the same as the other digital channels.

The 'channel' table now looks ok, as far as I can tell but it has made absolutely no difference, I still can't get the program guide information for my digital channels

I am going to read up the following wiki article again to see if it relates to my problem ..

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... GuideIsOff

Kevin

I'm not sure if this will help, but I had to edit my DB to get some QAM channels to work in my R5E50 box. I changed the xmltvid in the frontend channel editor to get the program guide to display. I usually had to use the mythfilldatabase --refresh-all option to force the channels to update after changing the xmltvid values. Changing the channun values didn't seem to have any effect on the program guide for my system. Make sure that you edit the chanid in both the channel table and the pidcache table so that they sync up.

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13937&highlight=

_________________
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cameraready,
thanks for the pointers, one thing I haven't done yet is to make sure that I also edit the pidcache table to match the channum - I will fix that.

I started using --refresh-all yesterday, it takes a long time and I have read that I should limit doing this so as not to overload the servers.

I also realize now that I haveprobably been running mythfilldatabase as root, it seems as though I should have been running it as mythtv.

I have been using webmin to make my edits to the tables, is this ok?

I have also been told I can use the following technique ..

(this is from the excellent people at mythic.tv who sold me my Airstar card)

"If you want a manual but easy way to change any field in your channel data, you can do a backup in the KnoppMyth menu, and then uncompress /myth/backup/mythconverg.sql.gz with gunzip. This contains all the raw SQL data for your system. You can find the right tables and edit the fields manually (backing this file up first before you make your changes is recommended). Then save your changes, re-compress the file with gzip, then do a restore from the KnoppMyth menu. That will load in your changed data.
"

Thanks for the pointer to your post, there is ceretainly a lot of information there, hopefully something will help.

My next step is probably to start off with a 'clean slate', marc.aronson suggested I do the following, and this sounds like a good place to start, especially as I have done so much hacking now without really knowing what I am doing


"Carefully re-read the instructions for doing the R5E50 setup (assuming they exist) to see which you are supported to do first:

Scan the digital channels OR create the video source & download the channel lineup

from zap2it. I suspect that you need to create the video source AND do a download of the channel lineup before you do any scanning.

Before you do your next try, clean things out by doing the following:

o Delete all of your video sources in mythsetup.

o Verify in webmin that the videosources and channels tables are empty. Also verify that the "program" table is empty. Create your digital video source and have mythtv download the channel lineup from zap2it. Then examine your database with webmin before using the channel editor:

o Do the channels listed in the channels table have the right channelID's and numbers? They should, as they have been downloaded from zap2it. Assuming all is well, use the channel editor to set up 1 digital channel. Run mythfilldatabase (as mythtv, NOT root) and verify that things look reasonable. Are you getting guide data correctly now?

o If yes, add another channel and see how things look.

o The idea is to add 1 channel at a time until things "screw up".

Hopefully by doing the various examinations and going 1 step at a time, you will be able to figure out what is going wrong."

If you have any thing to add to the above flow to ensure I do start off with a 'clean slate', please let me know,

Kevin

How did you spot that the xmltvid was wrong? Was it missing, or was it just the wrong value?

I might be able to look at the listings in zap2it.com (not the 'lab' site) to find what should be the correct xmltvid.

Kevin

I decided to clear out the video sources and program data and start again, unfortunately it made no difference, I still don’t get guide data for my digital channels. Anyway, here is what I did ..

(in mythtv-setup)
1. deleted my two video sources
2. In webmin, checked that the ‘channel’ and ‘program’ tables were empty – they were
3. create my zap2it source for my digital channels (note, I chose not to set up the video source for my analogue card at this point)
4. Under input sources - setup my Airstar card, point to the zap2it video source, load the channel lineup first, then perform the channel scan
5. exit setup
6. start backend
7. watch tv; first channel appears on my tv, shows as channel ‘58#2’
8. Use channel editor (‘e’), correct the channel number to ‘181’, hit the probe button to fill in the rest of the fields
9. In webmin, correct the ‘chanid’ to be ‘1181’
10. As mythtv user, ran mythfilldatabase -–refresh-all
11. watch tv, go to the program guide – it still doesn’t show any program data for channel 181 !
12. In webmin, check the ‘program’ table – no data!

I noticed when I ran mythfilldatabase ..

2007-04-06 13:03:56.767 Checking day @ offset 13, date: Thu Apr 19 2007

What is ‘day @’ ?? this doesn’t look right to me,

<EDIT> I checked in zap2it.com to find out the expected value for xmltvid for channel 181, it is 51529
Then I checked the channel table in webmin, and it does have this value for xmltvid, so I assume that this is not causing the problem.

I also checked the pidcache table using webmin but it reports ..

" This table contains no data.
Data in this table cannot be edited because it has no primary key."

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,

Kevin

Kevin, in R5D1 releases and earlier, the source ID numbers would increase every time you created a new source, and the numbers were never got re-used when a source was deleted. I suspect your HD source ID is no longer source ID # 1. If you have the patience to go through this again, I wojuld try a full re, incluing the dropping of your video sources, without doing any editing of the chanID columns. ie: Eliminate your step # 9.

Marc

Marc,
to be honest I was surprised when I removed the video sources and just added the Airstar one. Before, when I had both my analogue and digital cards, the analogue (PVR-500) was assigned source ID=1 and the Airstar (digital) was assigned source ID=2. I have read of problems with the source ID keeping incrementing each time, maybe this was a bug that has been fixed in R5E50?

I have a few more experiements to try, if that fails I will try the above flow, eliminating step 9.

Kevin

Marc,

I am getting somewhere. I left things as they were from running the flow in my earlier post (including the change of the chanid). I went to the labs.zap2it site and changed my lineup so it only had channel 181, I deleted all the rest.

Then I ran mythfilldatabase as 'mythtv' and I now see the lineup for that channel

I might not get back to this for a couple of days as it is Easter, but I am hopeful that I can start adding the channels one by one and get it to work.

I have been seeing some problems with the backend not starting, but I seem to remember seeing a post about a script to fix this. It is not a major problem, but a pain to keep having to manually restart it. This problem has plagued me before but it went away, but since messing with the channel stuff it has come back,

Kevin