I've had requests for a support forum to discuss issues with the ATSC in Canada hack.  If you have questions or need help, please post here and I'll do my best to monitor and respond.

The Windows 7 instructions are located here.

Add in multiple guide listings here.

-Pete

 Question from the blog comments:

Ok i have ran the 2 files you supplied and when I scan i only see the analog channels from cogeco. i also have an antenna hooked up and no channels are found. But i can add them on my own. here is what i cant do. I'm unable to edit the channel to add guide info as it says no data for all the us listings.

I'm running a retail copy of windows 7, i hope some can shed some light on why it's not working.

I used the custom location and found that i'm one number short compared to the guide.

EX guide says to copy the nine digit id, well in my version of windows 7 i only have an 8 digit id.

Does this batch file just needed to be updated?

The number of digits should be fine, I made a bad assumption that all IDs are 9-digits long.  I'll make some assumptions: that you're in Canada and you're trying to add US listings to your guide.  Let me know if those assumptions are incorrect.  Here's what I'd suggest for troubleshooting:

• See if the zip code you used turns up the channels you would expect on zap2it.com.  It's using the same data, so that should validate that the channels even work.
• Try setting up Media Center as if you are in the US (I'm guessing you already did if you have a guide ID).  Does it work and do the channels come in with guide info as you'd expect?
• Some things to verify (again you probably already did):  Did you update the number in all three places for the MXF file?  For the scheduled task, navigate to the task scheduler and review the setup in there to ensure the proper number is being used in the command that the task runs every night.  You can also manually run the task from there.
  
• After manually running the task, are there any errors in the Windows event log?
• When running the setup and tasks file, it's important that Media Center isn't already updating the guide via its normal processes.  It's possible that they are/were conflicting.

Not a request for support, but only reporting that your ATSC bat file worked great for getting an AverMedia Nano expresscard dual tuner to properly work from within Media Centre on a Windows 7-64 laptop.

 The card worked fine for both analog and digital over the air with the included AverMediaCentre software but Windows MC would not see the card, either the analog or digital side when scanning for a tv-tuner.  It could be manually set up for analog antenna or cable though.  But the inablility for Windows MC to see the digital side of the card was driving me batty.  Now it is fully set up with all the program data properly mapped over thanks to your complete instructions.

Actually i do have one question regarding manually adding DTV channels.  When adding a channel MC first asks of a "Digital TV channel" that is in a XX . X format then on the next screen asks for an "Assigned frequency" number that seems to have a maximum of two digits [ XX ].  Where do i get that second number?  The charts that you linked to have all of the channels (both displayed and virtual) in a 3 digit format, ie. xx.x  I am trying to fill in my potential list of DTV over the air channels for Toronto by filling in the gaps for channels that havent yet been scanned yet (i am on the north side of an uptown appartment building).

 Thanks for the work on the bat file, the lack of official support within windows for the future and present of digital TV is wierd to say the least.  Or is this just a canadian thing?

 It's just a Canadian thing unfortunately.

The most up to date Toronto listings are here:

http://www.remotecentral.com/hdtv/

The assigned frequency number you want is the one in the "Actual" column.  Just use the whole number, ignore the number to the right of the hyphen.

 Hi peter and anyone else reading this, as you mentioned about the Id's

The number of digits should be fine, I made a bad assumption that all IDs are 9-digits long.

You we're right peter the Id's are 9-digits long for digital channels and if you have an 8-digit Id that is analog channels.

The way to change the Id is to use the left or right arrows when looking at the Id page, I'm not sure why the analog was showing first this time I setup but it was. If you are having an issue where your Id is only 8-digits, use the left arrow key in that window and highlight the ID and hit the left arrow key again. You can now see the 9-digit Id. Once I used the 9-digit Id things we're back to normal and work as expected.

Thanks Peter, you rock brother. 

Hi Peter, thanks so much for all your info....It has helped *so* much.  I am however having trouble getting my guide info into media center....mostly (I think) because I can't find out what guide id I need.  I'm in Calgary and I only have an ATSC tuner in my media center.  I only get 2 channels - CFCN-HD (CTV Calgary) and CICT-DT (Global Calgary) which are ExpressVu channels 1131/1132 and/or Shaw cable channels 210/199...but I can't figure out how to get the evu or shaw listings into my media center...afaict media center will not allow me to select either of them because I just have the ATSC tuner....when I do the TV setup thing to try to add them they just don't show up (or maybe I don't know where to look).  Would the guide id for expressvu be the same canada-wide or is it different based on locale? 

Any help is appreciated.  Thanks

 I have the exact same problem as redec. I have an ATSC tuner only. Somehow I need to find out the code for Shaw Digital here in Vancouver so I can hack in the listings and map them to the channels I can receive.

Can anyone help?

Update: agraham was able to flip his tuner into QAM mode to get cable listings...so he was able to get his listing and was nice enough to look mine up for me....so we're both up and running now.  Thanks again for the great howto!

 Hi Peter,

Well, my harddrive decided to go on my 2 year old VMC. I remember the pain it took to get it going the first time so it was refreshing to bump into your blog.  Unfortunately, things are never that simple hence I'm asking for help! I am running Vista 32 sp2 using TVPack and followed your instructions on a brand new install. I'm in the process of configuring the digital tuner. I own 2 ati 650 combos and they get detected but no channels are found. Seems fair, I live in Vancouver and use Shaw. When it comes time to add missing channels I don't get the option to "add DTV channel". Instead I get "add Qam channel" and "add channel" option. Neither work. I'm looking to get the 3 OTA channels I once had working before the drive failure. Any suggestion where to go from here?

Thanks, 

Jeff

Jeff:

Sorry, just got back from vacation.It sounds like the tuner card was set up as a QAM card and not an ATSC card.  Instead of automatic setup of your tuner cards, I would do manual setup and choose the ATI 650 as digital antenna.

Pete

 Hi Pete,

Great to hear from you and thanks for the reply. Hope you had a great vacation. :-)

I tried a manual setup in VMC and got the same results... no option to add it as an ATSC card. As a test, I went back and changed my region from Canada to the US and lo and behold it detected my digital card as ATSC. (At least gave the the option to treat it as such). I kind of remember this as one of many steps I had to do a few years ago before TV Pack came along. So I'm still kinda stuck with what I should try next.

 Thanks,

Jeff

TV Pack is a bit of a weird area, the old registry hack doesn't work and the new one I only tested on Windows 7.

Are you using this hack: http://thegreenbutton.com/blogs/pnear/archive/2009/08/10/enabling-atsc-amp-qam-in-canada-for-windows-7-rtm.aspx

Pete

 http://home.cogeco.ca/%7Epnear/TGB/TutorialSettingupATSCwithMediaCenterinWi_B7C5/tv87122c9c213af49349abaac685f7a2fb3.png

 The only thing is, the tuner is hooked up to an antennae therefore will not find any channels during the scan. Later as mentioned, I cannot add missing digital ATSC channels since there is no option (only Qam channels can be added)

 In my experiment with using US as my region, my digital tuners are detected as ATSC and I later have the option to manually add correct missing digital channels.

 thanks again for your time,

 Jeff

 I ran the batch file and then started MC7 - but when I run TV Set-up and change the region to Canada - it still gives me the "Unsupported Region" error...

 Is there something more to it?

 Yeah, someone else suggested that the March patch might have broken the hack.  However I haven't had time to test.