Updating Channel Lineup
Every now and then a cable company completely rearranges their lineup. The claim to do this in order to make things better, but it often seems that it's turns out being nothing but one big pain in the butt. Not only do you have to relearn where all your favorite channels are, but you have to fix MythTV as well! If you're a victim of this, hopefully this little HOWTO will help. It's most likely not complete as it's being written by a relative novice who mostly sits on the sideline but was a victim of a recent cable lineup reorginization.
Contents
Always Back Up
As always, whenever you're going to do anything that may be invasive to your MythTV setup, make sure you backup your database.
Let MythTV do the work
If your data source (zap2it/schedulesdirect) has already picked up the new lineup, the normal update script, mythfilldatabase, seems to do this job really well. However, it needs to be run with a special switch to make it happen.
$ mythfilldatabase --do-channel-updates
In my experience, this updating upcoming recordings, channel icons, etc. It all seemed to work.
Note: If you switched cable line-ups due to a change in location or company, you will have add your new line-up in your zap2it (or schedule direct) account, and run mythtv-setup to select the new line-up under channel setup.
Removing a channel
Sometimes updating the schedulesdirect lineup doesn't clean up the old channel. Or say you just removed one, but it is still showing up after mythfilldatabase. Delete the channel from your desired method, Frontend, mythweb, or mythtv-setup (don't run mythfilldatabase when it asks afterwards). I also uncheck the channel in schedulesdirect for good measure, although you shouldn't need to.
Then run
$ mythfilldatabase --remove-new-channels
That command is supposed to also update schedulesdirect.
No Guide Data or stale/incorrect data showing on a channel
I find sometimes the guide data is incorrect, or just missing. I have also had new channels not show any guide data. You can force a rebuild of the entire database to try to clean errors in the EPD.
$ mythfilldatabase --dd-grab-all
and when in doubt
$ mythfilldatabase --help
External References
This HOWTO was written after referencing the following sources:
