Previously I used Time Warner Cable in Redondo Beach, CA and was able to receive and record Clear QAM HD channels with Vista MCE w TV Pack.  About a month ago I moved and my roommate decided it would be a good idea to switch providers without consulting me.  We now have Verizon FIOS (Internet, TV, Phone package).  Internet is great, but...

The set-top box is basically a piece of junk.  The base model they give you doesn't allow you to view ANY hd channels, but for ten dollars more a month you can pay for that "privilige".  Additionally for the life of me I cannot get the set-top box's DVR to work.  With all of these problems I wanted to go back to the way things used to be so I disconnected the cable from the set-top box and plugged it directly into my Avermedia HDTV MCE A180 Tuner card which had served me faithfully before.

After finding the FIOS provider closest to me, I run a channel scan.  Then nothing.  It doesn't find any channels.  Now what's curious is that when I run the same cable directly to my television it has no trouble finding all of the unencrypted channels.


Just a little more info...  I previously had 3 tuners running, (1 Hauppauge dual tuner card, and the Avermedia tuner.)  Now that I have FIOS, the Haupptauge tuners no longer detects a siugnal because the signal is digital so is now useless.  For various reasons I'm unable to try a new HD tuner card without upgrading my machine (current machine only has one pci-e slot which is taken by my video card.)


So I supposed I'm wondering if anybody else has had this problem or a similar one, and if you have any solutions or suggestions.  Not really interested in OTA signals as, even after the June 12 switch, they do not come in reliably in my area.  So any suggestions excluding upgrading my FIOS provided tuner and getting OTA signals would be greatly appreciated.

I'd basically like to see my TV card display the unencrypted channels.  Thanks for all your help in advance!

System Specs:
Vista Home Premium (Service Pack 2 and TV Pack installed)
HP a603n
AMD Athalon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+ (2.5 GHz)
4GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD2600 Pro Video Card
Hauppauge PVR PCII Tuner Card
Avermedia A180 HD Tuner Card

(any more info needed?)

The channels are there, the scan just isn't picking them up.

Search online and figure out which channels they are actually broadcast on and then manually add them to MC.

Thanks much.  After fooling around I found a page at http://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/channels_us that lists the channels that you can map manually in your area.

Even so I still had another issue with MCE crashing everytime I tried to manually edit.  But I solved that by finally installing Windows 7 instead.  :)  It's beautiful btw.  Recommend it for all to try.

Thanks for the help.

bjdraw:

The channels are there, the scan just isn't picking them up.

Search online and figure out which channels they are actually broadcast on and then manually add them to MC.

Correct - if it finds a channel, but it can't associate it to a guide listing, it doesn't show in the guide - you have to manually edit the channel, enable it, and associate it to a guide listing (if there is one, otherwise the channel will show, just No Data for the guide data - I  have a QAM channel called th!s in Houston Comcast that has no guide listing, but I can tune to it.)