Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Opportunistic scanning screwed my system

I had all my channels up and running perfectly in my Vista MC, but then some of them stopped working. Gah. I had a backup of my eHome directory but didn't know which files to look for at the time - I do now, but more on that later.

Doing a rescan for the missing channels did not work. Of course. Then I found an article on MS where they had a suggested solution for a problem scanning for additional services over DVB-T in Russia. They suggested to set another country and then rescan. Hm. It didn't say anything about Sweden, but I set up media center to scan for Denmark instead and the missing channels were magically found! Of course I was still missing a couple of other channels, but two more rescans found them. All channels are now back in place.

Next I downloaded Ian Dixons media center backup utility and made a backup of my settings. It turned out that channel info is in eHome\EPG\prefs\prefs.xml and recordings are in eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml. That was all that was needed to backup my channel settings. Hm.

Then, on to stop the nefarious opportunistic scanning that eats my channel info. Thanks to the alias push in a Swedish forum I found a solution. And here it is.

I still don't know exactly how to get my channels back with a channel scan, but since I now have a backup I'm good to go. At least until October 15 when the frequencies change here for DVB-T...

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