New feature spotlight: Automatic Line-up Changes
October 28th, 2007 at 1:03 pm by Rakesh
One of the new features under-the-hood of Beyond TV 4.7 is automatic line-up change detection. More than likely, at one point or another, your cable or satellite provider has changed your channel line-up on you. In one example, when Comcast recently took over Time Warner’s cable business here in Houston, they made a bunch of line-up changes:
In an effort to more closely group channels by genre, Comcast adjusted the location of several networks in the channel lineup. Last week, the following networks moved channel position while remaining in the same level of service: TBS (to Channel 51 from 31), Spike TV (to Channel 68 from 32), The Golf Channel (to Channel 32 from 68), ABC Family (to Channel 48 from 70), Court TV (to Channel 67 from 71), FX (to Channel 31 from 72) and MSNBC (to Channel 80 from 73). WE TV is now part of the Digital Classic lineup on Channel 350 and was previously part of Standard Cable on Channel 48.
Prior to Beyond TV 4.7, changes like this would go undetected. You’d have to know about the change and then you’d have to manually reset your line-up using the Beyond TV Setup Wizard. Now, Beyond TV automatically detects these changes and reconfigures your line-up and recordings so they get made from the right channel.
For example, this morning Beyond TV detected a bunch of new channels on my cable line-up and gave me these notifications:
October 30th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
This is a great feature. My cable provider changed approximately 50 channels in my lineup over the weekend and BTV handled this flawlessly. The only thing I needed to do in the Web manager was hide some of the new HD channels added to my lineup - no HD in my household yet.
October 31st, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Rakesh,
How are you getting HD channels like USA HD and History HD in BeyondTV? With QAM? I did not think digital cable tuners could be used with 3rd party applications in Window Vista. Am I wrong?
I love BeyondTV and use it all the time.
November 1st, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Kevin,
This was actually a setup on my laptop that I use for demos when I’m on the road.
But you are right that there isn’t a way to natively get HD channels like this unless they are available unencrypted through QAM.
And one can always run the analog composite audio and video feeds from your set-top box into your TV tuner card and use an IR blaster to tune the set-top box and get these channels, though not in their native HD quality.
November 2nd, 2007 at 1:22 pm
On my system, there seem to be lineup changes *every day*, which is pretty annoying. I’m on DirecTV.
Also, does this feature take into account the channels I’ve “hidden” and maintain that setting?
November 6th, 2007 at 4:51 am
AWESOME! One of the best 4.7 enhancements.
November 14th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Ah ha! That must explain why my parent’s computer mysteriously hid channels 22 through 79 once. I had a bunch of messages in the warning log telling me that there was a lineup change. Unfortunately all the channels were still there but had all been hidden. I had to go into the channel settings and unhide all of them.
It only happened once so I didn’t report it to tech support - I figured they’d ask me to grab a debugview log of it - since it only happened once that isn’t likely.
November 16th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
No reply to my questions, above?
November 18th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
I agree that this is a great feature. If it would just stop adding channels that were never part of my lineup to begin with. I am having to go in and manually remove them every day. I wish there was a way to turn off this feature until they can figure out how to really make it work. So far it’s not enough to make me find another piece of software, but it’s getting close.
January 14th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Rapid cable in COvington, VA has channels 9 and 20 switched in the lineup. I have that new feature enabled but it has not caught this issue. How can I switch them manually? Recrodings are not happening right becuase of this. Missed premiere of new terminator show!
I have logged into the local host port but the only thing it lets me do is hide/unhide channels. Missing something?