Project

General

Profile

Forums » Tutorial and setups »

Time Warner Cable Warning

Added by Steve Miller about 11 years ago

FYI, Time Warner Cable, TWC, is rolling out channel list changes. Their real reason is unknown. The cover story is that it is to enhance customer experience. Some areas of the country, they are publicly announcing the change. In other areas, they are doing it piecemeal and then denying that they altered anything. Their help desk actually implied that all my TVs must be broken!

For me on basic cable in Austin, TX, last Friday all my TV channels went to "No Signal" Rescanning for channels on the TV brought back the channels, but at different channel numbers. For example FOX used to be 1501 for HD Now FOX is D7.1. The effect on tvheadend is that I cannot record with the error message
"Recording unable to start: "test": No input detected". I am using an hdhomerun. I, of course, rebooted everything. The tuner worked OK using the Windows software, so I knew it could receive the channels. When I did a scan log of the hdhomerun, I found that the program names changed. Instead of "1501: KTBCDT" it is now "61: 7.1 KTBC-HD". I messed around the channel name and channel number in tvheadend, but none of these changes seemed to help anything. Monitoring the hdhomerun driver, it seemed to be tuning the proper channel, it just could not find the desired stream. Turns out that TWC also changed ALL PID numbers for each channel. Rescanning the muxes did not seem to pick up these changes. The only way I can get it back is to delete the muxes, then discover them again and finally manually reassign the channel names. (I never could get assigning the muxes to work, other than brute force trial and error.)

So others on TWC, be aware. If you find your live TV channels have shifted around, then tvheadend will probably be hosed.


Replies (1)

RE: Time Warner Cable Warning - Added by Steve Miller about 11 years ago

A word of warning, about correcting the TWC PID problem. After deleting all my muxes and then recreating them, I found that all my saved recordings are gone from the database. Apparently, when the channel names went away tvheadend decided that the corrsponding recordings were not valid and removed them from the list. The actual recordings are not gone, they are still in the folder where you told it to store recordings. What is gone is the link in the database to these files.
I know nothing about accessing this database except through the normal tvheadend web address. Therefore, I cannot tell you how to add these items back in. Since, I just use this as a simple DVR, I only had about 12 shows stored that were not yet watched. To recreate these entries, I moved the files into a sub-folder and then set up bogus 1 minute manual recording with titles that matched the show I was trying to recreate. After the bogus recording has completed successfully, I then move the large real video file into the main folder and overwrite the bogus one. Brute force method, but doable if the number of recordings is small.

    (1-1/1)