[mythtv-users] report QAM changes? (Comcast Digital Switchover)

[Brian J. Murrell]

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 11:29 -0500, Tom Bongiorno wrote: 
> 
> I would love such a tool,

Yeah, that would be handy.

> but I doubt it would work.

Perhaps, depending on the cableco's shenanigans, not 100% of the time.
Only in the most nefarious cases would it fail completely I think.

> It might only be
> able to tell you that there is no longer a channel at the expected
> frequency, but not a different channel.

But it would also be able to tell you that a new channel is available a
previously unused (for qam) frequency.

So if the tool could alert when a previously available channel is no
longer available and/or when a previously unavailable channel is now
available the only fail is when there are completely frequency "swap"s.
Not likely I don't think.

> A channel that should be identified
> as 3.1 is now 82.1 for some unknown reason.

Right, and that likely shows up as 3.1 is now "invalid" and/or 82.1 is
now "valid".  If you get a notification of a newly available channel, it
wouldn't take very long of manual watching to figure out what it is and
then if the old frequency is still broadcasting something on it, you can
go to it and see what's new there.

Here, the last time they renumbered it was just a case of moving all of
the sub-channels to a new major channel.  as a contrived example,
45.{34,67,231,323,678,984} were all moved to 95.{34,67,231,323,678,984}.
I would think such a move should be easy for software to determine.

> Determining the channel info is the key.  Until that can be reliable,
> we may not be able to automate anything usable.

I have suggested previously to Schedules Direct that in addition to
their analog and digital (set top box tuning) guides that they carry a
[clear]qam tuning guide also that in the worst case (where no other
information source is available) is community supported and maintained.
Seems there is no activity there yet though, that I know of.

Cheers,
b.

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