Win7 Media Center and missing QAM's

[vi edit]

I've got a rural cable provider that fortunately still provides QAM for many stations. My HDTV's (Sony and a couple Samsungs) pick up the QAM stations without any issue and they all work on the channel ID's provided by the cable company.

But when I try to find them with my Media Center PC I'm missing over a dozen of them. Most of the local HD feeds and my beloved ESPN are all missing. I tried going into the "add channel" function of Media Center and manually entering it, but it still doesn't work. It picks up all of the analog stations but watching that on a 100" projection screen is uuuuuuugly.

Is there something I'm missing? I've fiddled around with it for several hours trying to scour through all of the channels it did find, but to no success.

 

[BornStar]

Here's what I did to enable the QAM channels I was missing in 7MC.

Settings->TV->Guide->Edit Channels

I recommend turning Show Preview on and then flipping through all the channels without a lock next to the name. These are the channels that Media Center didn't know what to do with so it just left them alone. It means that your cable company didn't put the QAMs where Media Center expected them to be so rather than guessing and being wrong, it just left them along. I had hundreds of these to go through before I finally found ABC so I understand your pain.

 

[vi edit]

Ah. So those are orphan channels. I had a lot of duplicate things out there, like 2 "54.1". I was reading that the QAM channels can be quite a mess in that there can be a virtual channel that is completely unrelated to the physical channel that it is mapped to. If you have a cable box it map for you from the cable company, but Media Center can't do it.

I have to question what the functional difference between the Vista scan and detect is vs. a basic TV tuner and how the TV can scan it and work it just fine but Media Center freaks out.

 

[Dirigible]

I think the silicon dust (makers of hdhomerun) have something on their web site tht will let you get all the actual channel numbers so you can then use them in your "edit channel" efforts. Takes a lot of the guesswork out.

That's what I used until stinking comcast encrypted just about everything.

 

[vi edit]

Yep, I tried that website but they don't have my rural carrier on their list

 

[Dirigible]

 

[vi edit]

What a quirky freaking application. So last night I deleted off the previous guide/channel lineup and let it rescan everything. I found like 179 channels or something like that. It really messed up all of the QAM channels for the locals and really did nothing right with them.

I'd have like 5 listings for "Channel 54".

So I went through every single channel in the 40-80 range including all of the .XX and disabled all of the junk ones that weren't actually affiliated with anything.

After doing that I was still missing all of the local HD stations and the cable ones (ESPN, Speed, ect).

So I went in and manually added them as a QAM and BAM!. They were there.

WTF?

I added them half a dozen different times before and they never worked. Is there some sort of channel cap at like 180 that Media Center has and even though it technically will let you add more, it won't actually create more to view? Seems like there was something with the manual process of disabling the junk stations that allowed me to successfully add legitimate ones.