[mythtv] Tuner channels setup (and other stuff)

[Erik Arendse]

At 10-1-03 22:18, you wrote:
>As well as now being able to change channels, I also learnt more about
>the large numbers on the OSD that appear when number keys are pressed.
>I originally expected these to correspond to channel (ie. BBC1 == 1,
>BBC2 = 2, etc.) but they seem to show the frequency/channel numbers
>(ie. BBC1 == 22, BBC2 == 28, etc.) This is not how I would expect it to
>work, but is perhaps how american TVs work?

Americans think in channelnumbers. A TV channel seems to be identified by 
its channelnummer on the grid used in the US.

I don't see how a station can have different transmitters on the same 
frequency in different locations without interference, but perhaps it is 
all cable they are using.

In Europe people are used to seeing stations identified by the channel they 
programmed on their TV's, if somebody lives in england he puts BB1 on '1', 
BBC2 on '2' etc.

Nobody has any idea when using a TV what channel or frequency a station is 
on. With air-transmitted stations different frequencies are used anyway in 
different regions to avoid interference, and somebody living in a 
neighbouring country might put his own local staitions at the lower numbers 
and put the BBC on '9' and '10'.
In my country even cable uses different frequencies for the same stations 
in every city.

As the grids here (europe-west at my place) are not exclusively used 
anymore (to put channels closer together that the grids allow) most 
stations transmit on channels like "42-", which means "just below 
gridchannel 42" etc., or they just give you the frequency straightaway.

As as beside: on the europe-west grid we use channel identifiers like 'S1' 
besides '1' here as well, for which support in 0.7 was allright, but it's 
partly broken again in CVS. (The origin of the S-channels is that the 
europe-west grid covers air-channels only by origine, the S-band was added 
for cable use to increse the available channels but is in use for other 
purposes in the air.)

Putting a new usercontrolled (manually) column in MythTV to identify and 
order the channel independant of the xmlid, mythid, stationtag, channelnr, 
frequency is on my todo-list...

>I thought that I'd read
>somewhere that frequency/channel details were picked up from a xawtv
>config file, but this may have been another PVR project! Even so, it
>currently requires devling into the database so I would have expected a
>more user-friendly way to be available.
Mythfilldatabase in CVS (or 0.8 to be) has an option --xawchannels which 
reads channelinfo from a xawrc file for non-US users.

Erik