User talk:Ll

Instead of -ao null, I'd suggest -nosound instead.

Some Fox affiliates have incorrect Dolby AC encoding and the notorious "a52" error will cause mplayer to go in endless loop.

--Made the change, and it came back with a few more channels, Thanks... (made changes to the article) --Ll 14:22, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Hey, great work here! Quick question - have you done any research to see if the [xxxx] channel numbers always map to the same channels? For example if [0001] is FOX on every network? Possibly could you show me your mappings and I'll compare them to mine (scan spit out about 239 channels - many many repeats).

--Abarbaccia 00:21, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Since you're already using awk in fixnames, you can let awk do all the work:

$ awk -F ":" '{print NR":"$2":"$3":"$4":"$5":"$6}' channels.conf > channels.conf.new

Also, I believe the number in [xxxx] is the hex value of the decimal given in the last column of channels.conf. At least, that's what it looks like in my file. Take at look at your original file:

[0006]:657000000:QAM_256:74:75:6
[000c]:657000000:QAM_256:0:80:12
[0001]:657000000:QAM_256:76:77:1
[0005]:663000000:QAM_256:0:65:5
[0006]:663000000:QAM_256:0:77:6
[0002]:663000000:QAM_256:0:68:2
[000b]:663000000:QAM_256:74:75:11
[000c]:663000000:QAM_256:72:73:12

6=6 c=12 1=1 5=5 2=2 b=11 c=12

--Anguyen

On your scan.sh script you have the hashbang set to: #!/bin/sh

I discovered an issue with this on Ubuntu 8.10 in which the script would output "[[: not found" while running. It turns out that /bin/sh was linked to /bin/dash and apparently dash has an issue with "if [[...". Because of this mencoder didn't get killed after the first channel and each subsequent channel would fail due to the tuner being locked.

I changed the hashbang to #!/bin/bash and the script ran correctly.

Thanks! --Birus 00:09, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

This page helped a lot. A few comments:

• Unless you run the scan during prime time, you may end up with MPEG files full of infomercials. Run it bracketing prime time, when the programming is unique, shows have a network "bug" in the corner, and TV listings are more specific. Prime time is also the best time to live-view the channels.
• Look up, save, edit and print out the local listing as provided by the "Silicon Dust" site: http://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/channels_us
• Also view the SOURCE of the Silicon Dust listing page for your area. It has frequency and program information for the channels. This is a great way to vet the output of the scandvb utility. Even if the major channels numbers will be off, the frequencies and program numbers will be consistent. You can save the page source as an xml file and import it into a spreadsheet.
• I've found that scandvb occasionally mis-scans a valid channel, resulting in a line like this:
  [000c]:663000000:QAM_256:0:73:12
  Note the zero entry! When scan.sh works through the list it won't find video there. You won't be able to view that channel manually. However, I have found that I can "repair" the line by using a reasonable replacement for the zero; the actual value is generally one less than the next value. In this case, 72. Edit, save, and view with mplayer. Chances are the missing channel will be there. (scandvb produced a listing with an entire transport's worth of channels with this problem.)

Stefan Jones --StefanJ