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Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2017 1:46 am
by jfreiman
I've got a problem that I don't think is directly related to EPG123, where after installing EPG123 -- I have each channel NUMBER listed two times.

Image

I know some channels are listed multiple times on different channels numbers, but all of these duplicates are driving me crazy and I think it's slowing down editing my recording schedules, etc.

After this happened, I re-ran the EPG123 Client setup, selected Step 1 Clean Start, chose it until the eHome folder was deleted and then proceeded following the setup guide step by step.

I do have 2 Ceton InfiniTV 6 tuner cards, but they are both setup using the same "guide" so I don't think they are being listed for each card.

Does anyone know if a) there is a way to remove one of the duplicates without re-running Windows TV setup again? More importantly, if I do need to re-run Windows Media Center TV Setup again, how can I be sure that I don't have this issue again? :/

What did I do wrong.... lol

Re: Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2017 1:52 am
by garyan2
Not due to EPG123, but is definitely something we need to figure out what happened. Each of you tuner cards are living separate lives and each has 9998 channels each. The question is, why were they not merged together during setup?

Re: Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2017 9:13 pm
by gfigg42
Same thing just happened to me. Not every channel was duplicated. The lower 74 analog were along with the first 150 or so digital channels. One listing had the channels attached to the proper tuners, the other did not.

My setup is two analog and QAM tuners and one digital cablecard dual tuner. The cablecard tuner does not tune the lower 74 analog at all. Before installing epg123 I often had problems with improper tuners being activated for digital channels and vice versa. I would also have problems with "ghost" tuners being listed. i.e., multiple listings for the same tuner but only one listing would actually work. I would manually have to edit the channels to fix these problems when they appeared. It really was a pain at times.

I decided to try epg123 because of the recent outage and I was sick of waiting for a fix. After I noticed the double channel listings, I inspected the sources for each of the listings. One listing had the analog sources, the other the digital sources. I edited channels and disabled the channels attached to the wrong tuner sources and everything seems to be fine. I do not know why this happened or why it didn't happen for every channel. I followed the clean install setup for epg123 without any errors.

I'm actually fine with this as it easily allowed me to identify the improperly mapped sources and quickly disable them. Much easier than editing every channel manually.

So far every channel I've checked has the proper tuner sources only so I'm hopeful it stays that way.

Great work on epg123. It's nice to have my guide back and better than ever.

EDIT: This is on Spectrum/Time Warner in Indiana.

Re: Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2017 10:22 pm
by garyan2
This is a weakness in the automatch function. EPG123 strictly goes by the channel number, regardless of tuner type.

I'm curious, could you take a snapshot of the client GUI showing the Scanned Source(s) column like below? Thinking about future versions of EPG123 and how to deal with setups like yours.
VirtualBox_Windows 7 Both Tuners_08_07_2017_15_19_45.png

Re: Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2017 2:01 am
by gfigg42
Least I can do. The first image has some of the lower analog that were duplicated and the second image has some of the upper digital that were duplicated.
1.jpg
2.jpg

Re: Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2017 4:35 am
by garyan2
Awesome, these help extremely to describe the limitation of automatch specifically and EPG123 in general (at the moment).

For starters, because we decline the program TOS, we don't get specific tuner setups for any lineup. So without knowing what channels are available, WMC gives you all of them.

Satellite: 2-9999
Digital Cable: 2-9999
Analog Cable: 2-158

Because you have both Digital Cable and Analog Cable, both devices have channels 2-158. When EPG123 does its automatch, all it does is look at the channel number of the device and the channels downloaded from Schedules Direct. It does not care what the device is, nor does it care if there is any station on that channel on that device. If the channel numbers match, the guide listings get applied. In your case, since both are really from the same source (cableco), the lineup is the same so not too wrong. Worst case is if someone has both Satellite and Digital Cable on the same WMC. There is no way an automatch would work and would require a large investment of time to manual match lineup stations to guide channels.

For ATSC and QAM, the tuners actually have to scan the frequencies, so what they can see is what you get.

Now for the future, I have cracked the code in having multiple and separate lineups in the generated mxf file. This means I can have a EPG123 Satellite lineup, an EPG123 Digital Cable lineup, an EPG123 OTA lineup, .... We would then be able to sort and select only the satellite guide channels and automatch with a satellite lineup, and do the same for all the other transports. Make it a lot easier.

Re: Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2017 5:35 am
by garyan2
jfreiman wrote:Does anyone know if a) there is a way to remove one of the duplicates without re-running Windows TV setup again? More importantly, if I do need to re-run Windows Media Center TV Setup again, how can I be sure that I don't have this issue again? :/
Sorry I didn't think of this earlier. Guide Tool has the ability to merge tuners and take care of this for you quickly. You can download Guide Tool from my downloads page, look on the right side in the "Useful Programs" panel if you don't have it already. Either will work, but I prefer 1.2.5 for EPG123. Just open it up and select the Merge Tuners button on the strip and you will be in good order.
GTMerge.PNG

Re: Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2017 4:59 pm
by gfigg42
Happy to help with the screenshots. Love the guide and it's running great. Fantastic work!

Re: Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2017 2:41 am
by jfreiman
garyan2 wrote:
jfreiman wrote:Does anyone know if a) there is a way to remove one of the duplicates without re-running Windows TV setup again? More importantly, if I do need to re-run Windows Media Center TV Setup again, how can I be sure that I don't have this issue again? :/
Sorry I didn't think of this earlier. Guide Tool has the ability to merge tuners and take care of this for you quickly. You can download Guide Tool from my downloads page, look on the right side in the "Useful Programs" panel if you don't have it already. Either will work, but I prefer 1.2.5 for EPG123. Just open it up and select the Merge Tuners button on the strip and you will be in good order.
I installed GuideTool 1.2.5 and made the change you suggested and all the duplicates are gone. In WMC Edit Channels, I will have to clear out unused/wanted stations again, but I don't have to run TV Setup again! :)
EPG123 Client - Guide Tool.png
EPG123 Client - Guide Tool Scrn
Merge Tuners.png
GuideTool TunerMerge 1
Guide Tool Merged.png
GuideTool TunerMerge 2

Re: Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2017 4:17 pm
by gsr
Just to add a bit of info, I ran into essentially the same "problem" setting up EPG123 last night, but ended up with 9 copies of each CableCard channel. My brother and I share the same 9 SiliconDust HDHomerun Prime CableCard tuners, so to avoid a bunch of "tuner not available" errors in WMC each time a recording starts when the other PC is using a tuner, I set up the tuners in reverse order, which means I have to manually configure my tuners when I do the initial TV setup in WMC (yeah, it's lots of fun adding each of the 9 tuners individually...). I ended up with just over 90 THOUSAND channels in WMC after the initial run of EPG123. The merge tuners solution using Guide Tool seems to have resolved this. If there happens to be a way to do this automatically as part of the EPG123 setup, that would be nice as it would save an extra step, but it's not the end of the world.

After the current extended outage of Rovi data, it's nice to have data again. :)

Re: Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:11 pm
by garyan2
gsr wrote:If there happens to be a way to do this automatically as part of the EPG123 setup, that would be nice as it would save an extra step, but it's not the end of the world.
Unfortunately no. I don't want to run the risk of epg123 guessing wrong whether the devices installed in WMC are connected to the same source (cable/satellite) or not. Might be able to get creative to address it, though.

Re: Just Switch to EPG123 - Each Ch# Listed 2x

Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:42 pm
by gsr
garyan2 wrote:
gsr wrote:If there happens to be a way to do this automatically as part of the EPG123 setup, that would be nice as it would save an extra step, but it's not the end of the world.
Unfortunately no. I don't want to run the risk of epg123 guessing wrong whether the devices installed in WMC are connected to the same source (cable/satellite) or not. Might be able to get creative to address it, though.
That certainly makes sense. Perhaps a simple way to address it is to just add a note about it in the next update to the instructions letting users know that if this happens, there's a simple solution by making use of the merge feature in GuideTool.