Satellite Channels Changing - Getting sick of this rubbish!

[xpi0t0s]

It's really getting me down. Satellite channels constantly changing from one transponder to another, Media Centre doing nothing about it. First I know about it: There was no TV signal on Channel XXXX and something I wanted didn't get recorded.

Sure, I CAN look it up on King of Sat and that's what I've been doing, but it's every few days and extremely tedious. Naturally there's no new channel on the transponder the missing channel is supposed to be on so I've then got the old needle and haystack problem of trying to find out which of the existing channels (disabled or otherwise) contains the signal. And then there's that stupid problem about the TV signal being on one channel and the MC program guide thinking it's on another. I *know* Sky boxes and other hardware don't have this problem so there must be some kind of automatic processing going on whenever these channels get moved around.

Isn't there some software solution to this yet? I've searched and searched and found absolutely nothing. Honestly, I'm about to ditch Win7MC and get myself a Freesat box instead.

Config is an Intel-based Win7 box with a single Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-HD-S2 card. I'm using motherboard sound and a graphics card of some kind. Got this PC a couple of years ago. And I'm in the UK.

[holidayboy]

There's no automatic way to do it I'm afraid, you could look at using DVBLink TVSource - that makes it easy to alter channels (with a 2 foot interface).

http://www.dvblogic.com

Hopefully things will settle down for a while once the shuffling is done, I'm not sure it's connected to the Olympic channels being added?........

[bobbob]

how difficult is it with a native solution? i also use dvblink and i just weekly download the new transponder file from king of sat and run a new scan. i dream of a day when dvblink can do this automatically....

[holidayboy]

It's not particularly difficult scanning and editing sat channels in MC, it's just a bit long-winded when doing it with a remote. Especially as each transponder scan can give you half a dozen unwanted channels along with the one or two that you were trying to get.

The new unwanted channels must be deleted one by one in the guide, or unticked in the edit channels menu.

Then you may well need to rename, renumber, edit sources (if combining with DVB-T etc..) and assign guide listings for each new channel.

Using a keyboard can be a help, but it's much easier to do it in a 2' interface. I guess that Guide Tool could save a bit of time once you get the transponders scanned in MC.....

[tony_park]

how difficult is it with a native solution? i also use dvblink and i just weekly download the new transponder file from king of sat and run a new scan. i dream of a day when dvblink can do this automatically....

Oberon has said that they are looking to provide a system whereby users can spot changes, and make the changes to an online database, these are then pushed out (somehow) to users, and the transponder details are then upto date - unfortunately there has been some delay on this functionality, but it will make things a lot easier when it arrives.

Fortunately its not a major problem in our household - the channels that have been moving, are not ones that we use often, so I usually sit down once a month and sort through them all