How to stay tuned to correct Transmitter

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aitcheff

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How to stay tuned to correct Transmitter

#1

Post by aitcheff » Mon Oct 12, 2015 10:14 am

Where I live in the UK I can theoretically tune to Freeview using either Crystal Palace or Reigate transmitters. In fact only Reigate gives me a good signal and my aerial is directed at Reigate.

However, by default WMC tunes to Crystal Palace. I can use the "Edit Sources" feature to correct this to the Reigate frequencies for my channels, but every week or so, some of the channels become retuned to Crystal Palace. I normally only discover this when a Recording fails.

This has only been a problem since upgrading to WMC 8. On WMC 7 I did need to edit sources originally, but then the channels stayed tuned to the correct frequencies.

Is there any way in WMC 8 to hard code the frequenceis? Or to stop this constant retuning? I have seen that this has been done by users in Australia/New Zealand by editing a file but I don't have enough detail to do that for myself. Also I am unsure whether I would then automatically pick up new channels if I tried this.

Any advice would be most gratefully received.

Harry.

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CyberSimian

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#2

Post by CyberSimian » Mon Oct 12, 2015 11:20 pm

aitcheff wrote:every week or so, some of the channels become retuned to Crystal Palace.
This is called "opportunistic scanning", and you should be able to turn it off by changing a setting in the registry. Looking at my notes, I see that there are TWO registry settings relating to this, but one may be for Vista and the other for Windows 7 (or both settings may apply to both versions of Windows). I had this problem on my Vista system, and set both registry settings to disable opportunistic scanning.

These are the registry settings (I have manually split the long lines to avoid silly line breaks; remove the "..."):

Regsitry Key 1
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\...
Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\...
Media Center\Service\BackgroundScanner\PeriodicScanEnabled

If this does not exist, create it as a DWORD and set the value to zero (disabled).

Registry Key 2
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\...
Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\...
Media Center\Service\GLID\DisableActualStreamOpportunisticScanning

If this does not exist, create it as a DWORD and set the value to one.
aitcheff wrote:Also I am unsure whether I would then automatically pick up new channels if I tried this.
No, WMC would not detect new channels. So you will need to decide which behaviour is of more importance to you.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

aitcheff

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#3

Post by aitcheff » Tue Oct 13, 2015 12:54 pm

Thanks for this! I'll give it a go and see what happens.

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