A lineup change has occurred

[DOlsen]

I came home tonight to see that the tivo was recording the wrong channel. Since putting in a PAL tuner, that hasn't happened, so I knew that something a little bit out of the ordinary must have happened.

Checking in the mail, I saw this message.

The TiVo Service has detected a change in your lineup.
Moved:

From 2 to 5 TV2
From 3 to 11 TV3
From 4 to 2 C4
From 5 to 44 Maori
From 6 to 60 Prime
From 7 to 41 TriTV
From 8 to 56 TAB
From 8 to 58 TAB

If any channels have moved, the scheduled recordings on those channels have already been moved to the new channel for you. If any channels were removed, the scheduled recordings on those channels have been deleted. To browse your new channel lineup (and check "on" the new channels if you receive them), go to "Messages and Setup", then "My Preferences", and then "Customize Channels", and then "Channels You Receive".

Thank you for using the TiVo Service!

--The TiVo Team

A bit of background,

The tivo has been set up against the Wellington FTA postcode. As the headend has been set up, it works fine, except that channel 2 is on 5, 3 is on 11 etc. In order to have all of the channels in the “correct order”, the channels were moved around using the following commands.

dbset 2357/14 Number 2
dbset 2357/15 Number 3
dbset 2357/16 Number 4
dbset 2357/19 Number 6
dbset 2357/20 Number 5
dbset 2357/22 Number 7
dbset 2357/18 Number 8


Then, appropriate entries were placed in the palmod.conf to match the correct frequencies to each channel.

f_tune="2:182250,3:224250,4:55250,5:655250,6:78325 0,7:623250,8:751250"

I did it this way because it worked, however, given that headend changes resulted in programs being missed (actually, the wrong channel being recorded), I’m a little worried about the impact of any future changes.

So, my question is, is there a more appropriate way to get the channels in this order (well the first 3/4 channels, not concerned about the order of the rest, as long as they are sequential) that will not be shuffled by changes such as this?

Cheers

[DOlsen]

Hi All,

I came home again tonight and the Tivo was recording the wrong channels due to the headend lineup change. Is anyone else experiencing this, or am I the only one who has set up my tivo so it is subject to these changes?

Details of my setup are detailed in my previous post in this thread. Is setting up a new postcode for Wellington with the channel numbers sequential order a possibility, or, is there some better approach to getting the pal turner to have TV1 on channel 1, Tv2 on channel 2 etc available?

I would assume that other people would experience similar issues whenever a channel lineup change occurs, but there doesn't seem to be many posts about this. Perhaps there is some simpler approach to changing the order of the channels that is not subject to this change that I am not using?

[ajharvey]

Not sure I can solve your problem, but those channel numbers are not aribtary, they are set by the Ministry of Economic Development's Radio Spectrum Management division (in fact for TV channels by their long reorganised predecessors - probably when such things were run by the Post Office) and they are are the bands allocated to the broadcasters, in order of frequency.

It is kind of a pain that the TIVO insists on putting the channels into order by channel number, especially when there's a logical order of channels that makes more sense. I can't really reproduce your scenario as I have a Thompson Tivo and the equivelent of palmod for it's tuner uses values hardcoded in the binary (ok, ok, I can compile my own) But if it's any consolation (and I'm guessing that you are a recent owner?) I found that as I set up more season passes and almost everything I ever watch is recorded, the channel order became so much less important to me than it was on, say, my VCR.

[catdog]

Ideally you should just get used to the channels being out of order

Of course that is not for everyone, so the crude hack I have used to prevent this issue is to set the headend ServerVersion value much higher than the current value (eg set to 500). When a lineup change occurs then your existing channels have a higher version number and are left alone.

The problem is that this hack cannot be undone easily, so if the emulator is majorly restructured and the station serverids get changed (unlikely), then your tivo will no longer receive data for the changed stations and may need a "clear and delete all" to get rid of the hack

[DOlsen]

Hi all,

Having the stations not in the correct order is not really an option due to the hassle it would provoke with my girlfriend…

For the last few years, I just used an external vcr tuner with the Saturn cable postcode which had the main stations in sequential order. Having the stations no longer in sequential order would be seen as going backwards by my partner, and I wouldn’t hear the end of it

It’s easy enough to change the frequency that the Tivo tunes to for each channel using the finetune option in palmod (I think you would need to change and recompile for UK tivos, but not sure), but the station to channel mapping is the problem.

I think the best solution to this would be new postcodes with the mapping of stations / serverids to channels being in a logical order rather than the “real” channel mapping, and let us override the channel / frequency mapping in palmod for the local situation as required. You could probably get away with 1 new postcode for the whole country with all regional tv stations in the same postcode, and leave it up to the user to turn on / off the regional stations as required (gaps between the national and regional stations would be easier to live with, and would save creating multiple postcodes if the overhead of doing so is high).

I am conscious of the effort involved in doing this though, so am happy to have a local work around.

Changing the headend serverversion is probably a good workaround for me, I’ll look into this tonight.

[catdog]

For the last few years, I just used an external vcr tuner with the Saturn cable postcode which had the main stations in sequential order.

Cant you just go back to doing this again? or do you have regional channels which are not in the Saturn guide?.

Run guided setup with the Saturn options, and when it asks if you have a STB, just choose no and it will use the PAL tuner (with the Saturn numbering). Use Palmod to 'fix' the frequencies for each channel and you should be good to go

[TimesOwn]

Hi
I'd use it - Wellington single channel Thomson - if it would work seamlessly? What I do not understand from the discussion is how much change would be required to use the new post codes? Would all data need to be deleted? What else?

[DOlsen]

What I do not understand from the discussion is how much change would be required to use the new post codes? Would all data need to be deleted? What else?

I'll be in a position to tell you this tomorrow. I'm setting up a new tivo for a friend, but I'll also use this opportunity to install against the old postcode, record a few shows, set up a few season passes, and then transfer to the new postcode.

[catdog]

Hi
I'd use it - Wellington single channel Thomson - if it would work seamlessly? What I do not understand from the discussion is how much change would be required to use the new post codes? Would all data need to be deleted? What else?

This depends on whether you are using the Thomson 2.5.5 image or the Philips 3.0 image on your tivo. It is rather simple for DOlsen using 3.0 as he can use palmod to configure the frequencies for his local area. For the 2.5.5 image you need to recompile ukchan.o with the correct frequencies for your area - adding another level of complexity.

All data would not need to be deleted, but I am not sure if season passes would continue to work or not (wishlists would still work).

[DOlsen]

Have tried a few runs through without deleting any data, but always end up with the "no cable providers were found in your zip code." message. Will try again tomorrow with a fresh install image.