Losing QAM mapping lately

[technohead]

This is happening to me too. For over 4 years, Beyond TV has been absolutely flawless for me. Now on almost a weekly basis, the mapping of the tuners to the lineup is broken. This is seriously pissing me off.

[bigasssuperstar]

I'll add my voice to the "I never thought it would happen to me"....

Makes no sense to me why it'd be happening, but I've had the experience lately of mapping the QAM stuff, then just days later, recordings getting no signal from the tuner with .. what, error 47? And having to delete and re-map for no apparent reason.

Given that there's been no change in BTV, I'm at a loss to imagine why this would happen.

[garyc]

Just noticed this thread and want to add my nickel's worth -- about two months ago I noticed that virtually all HD recordings were trashed ... they'd "record", but weren't playable. I have three 2250's, so thought perhaps one had failed, so I spent a week or so removing one-at-a-time to see if this changed things -- no difference.

Analog recordings all work fine. We were traveling a lot the past two months, so we simply set everything to record on SD channels and I figured I'd look into this when I got back. Apparently, I've got the same issue everyone else in this thread does -- mappings seem to simply be messed up. The frustrating thing is I can set it for one tuner (out of six), and it works fine -- but as soon as I set the next tuner, the previous one is messed up again. Not sure WHAT is happening, but hopefully someone at SnapStream will read this and give me a clue

I did submit a ticket a couple days ago, but didn't realize how common this issue seems to be. SOMETHING needs to get fixed !!

[bigasssuperstar]

I'll add another two cents to the five cents.

About a week ago, I mapped my qam channels. They included the ones that are always there, plus a coupla channels on free preview. Just one qam map -- the others were deleted .. leaving me with one analog lineup, one digital lineup (for the hd-pvr), and the qam lineup.

Recordings went ahead. Won't say they went fine, because I got some 'corrupt' ones.

One show failed recording, presumably because the free preview ended.

I shut down BTV, ran the Setup Wizard to re-map the qam lineup -- and the qam lineup wasn't even there any more! I didn't have the option to 'edit an existing lineup' -- the qam lineup just wasn't there any more. I had to scan and create a whole new qam lineup.

I'd make a House MD reference about "great, a new symptom!", but my House recording keeps coming up corrupt on QAM -- works fine when I'm playing it as it's recording, but as soon as the recording is done, the playback freezes and BTV won't play it any more 'til I run it through a quickstream fix in VideoReDo.

[Bill1426]

That sounds like Win Media Center service is still running...
Make sure it's disabled in Services...

[encoder]

I think it would be helpful to remember these two things:

1) If you have not lost your QAM mappings, turn off lineup detection to prevent this from happening. If you don't turn it off, it's a matter of time before you lose your mappings.

2) And if you already lost your QAM mappings, turning off lineup detection won't fix the problem. You'll need to remap. And don't forget to turn off lineup detection after the remap.

Before I turned off lineup detection I used to lose my QAM mappings every month. Now it's been months and I have not had a single issue.

[Wolfie351]

I used to lose my QAM mappings on a weekly basis until I turned off updating. Since then, I've lost it once. But, now since I get so few QAM channels, it only takes me 20 min or so to re-map. I do it for fun every couple weeks just to see if anything new is in the clear.

[bigasssuperstar]

I'm sort of in the same boat, Wolfie. QAM isn't the majority of my viewing. I get two sports channels (and I don't watch sports), four or five Canadian HD channels and one or two others ... plus French channels and CPAC & legislature (government proceedings). Out of all that, there are two or three channels I want to record, since (I would hope) it's more straightforward and reliable than the HD-PVR.

The QAM channels I want -- other than the 'free previews' that come and go month by month and have to be found like an easter egg hunt -- have stayed put at the same spots since I went HD at the start of the year.

I'd fully expect BTV to keep my QAM lineup and let me re-scan for changes ... not arbitrarily cause the lineup to disappear.

Otherwise, the lineup detection has been more helpful than harmful to me, moving recordings as the cable company reshuffles and adds channels throughout the year.

But, if the _solution_ to the _problem_ is to turn off a _feature_, I may have to choose which is more valuable to me -- the lineup change detection or the convenience of knowing my QAM lineup hasn't vanished.

[djphatjive]

Originally Posted by gye

Good point. We all need to file support tickets to get someone to work on this.

Good luck with that. They don't seam to care about consumers anymore. Just corporations...

[hmb29]

Originally Posted by djphatjive

Good luck with that. They don't seam to care about consumers anymore. Just corporations...

if that is completely true, there wouldn't be that 4.9.2 build that fixed the h.264 showsqueeze over 4gb issue and you wouldn't know to Disable Change Lineup Detection to not lose your QAM lineups as Kilsrat told us to do it.

they may not be updating BTV like they were before and we ALL know they aren't focusing on BTV, since I'm guessing they are trying to survive as a company, but it does feel like they keep an eye on the consumers, just not as much as before.

[Bill1426]

Originally Posted by hmb29

if that is completely true, there wouldn't be that 4.9.2 build that fixed the h.264 showsqueeze over 4gb issue and you wouldn't know to Disable Change Lineup Detection to not lose your QAM lineups as Kilsrat told us to do it.

Just an FYI,
"Change Lineup Detection" to disable was not from BTV support.. It was a user-to-user fix...

[garyc]

Snapstream DOES respond to support tickets quickly -- at least they did to mine on this issue and I got it resolved.

HOWEVER, there was a very disappointing note in the response ==> I had asked how much longer it might be before they finally add Closed Caption support to BTV -- noting that they clearly have superb support for it in their recording "engine", since that's what drives their commercial products [searching the captions for references to whatever keywords their customers want to look for]. The answer I got was "... Closed captioning for Beyond TV is not available and will not be available."

... clearly they've made a decision that they aren't going to include this in their consumer product.

[PaulF]

It just happened to me and I got the happy surprise that Comcast Portland added a couple of channels. One in clear QAM which in the guide and HDNet that is not in the guide or Zap2It. HDNet is a clear firewire channel so I e-mailed Zap2It as per the post above.

[Rabbotsfoot]

Adding yet another voice to this, I am having pretty much exactly the same issue. My HDHR channel mappings were fine for years. The channels do get moved around now and then but that is NOT what this problem is about. The problem can be stated concisely as follows:

BTV periodicaly fails to recognize any of the existing QAM lineups. The QAM lineups are on the list of lineups but are grayed out indicating BTV no longer thinks they are QAM lineups.The Setup Lizard only offers rescanning, delete or create an non guide lineup when its run in this situation.

As a side note: Snapstream.net has not had a correct line up for either my QAM or Cablebox in quite some time. I end up having to take one thats a super-set and disable many channels that don't actually exist in Extended Basic service.

[Jakesty]

I've had this happen now twice in the past week. While remapping, I can't get one of the stations which is still available. For some reason I get all of the normal locals in Clear QAM and The History channel. The History Channel is still available as I can watch it on a normal TV w/o a box, and when I run the BTV Wizard it initially detects it in the scan, but when I move forward to the major/minor number, it then can't tune or something and disappears. Can I manually put this in an XML file? Do you know which one? Or am I forced to to a custom listing? I really don't want the custom listing, but it might be the only way at this point.

thx, Jake