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Windows 7 Media Center in Canada (ATSC, QAM, Logos)

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234K views 495 replies 95 participants last post by  Dr.Dave 
#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
Knowing how many avid Media Center users there are here at Digital Home Canada, I wanted to let everyone know that the latest hacks for Windows 7 Media Center are now published. It's been a heck of a battle, one that has been fought on many fronts and I'm happy to announce that Canadian high definition in Media Center is working better than ever before!

The highlights:
- I've packaged and tested a new hack (easiest hack yet!) that enables ATSC and QAM in Canada with Windows 7 Media Center. This has been tested by myself and a handful of others on x86 and x64 versions of the RTM release. Thanks for your help!
- Included in the hack is a single-click batch file that add US OTA listings to your Media Center, providing subchannel support and enabling the HD preferences in Media Center recording logic.

-Pete

Edit by Dr.Dave March 9, 2014: The Microsoft links are no longer available. Here is a direct link to Peter Near's blog:

http://pnear.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/enabling-atsc-qam-in-canada-for-windows-7-rtm/

Download ZIP file:

https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=3323acf37bd7b107#cid=3323ACF37BD7B107&id=3323ACF37BD7B107!236
 
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#272 ·
No Programming Data Three Weeks After Peter Near's OTA Hack

A friend helped me with Ken Nist's Windows 7 Home Windows Media Center hack for Canadian and American Over-The-Air listings.

On the night of the hack everything worked great. And for about the last three weeks everything has been great. I have all of my OTA stations listed perfectly.

But WMC has been unable to update the programming guide information. So now my TV tuner is working but the guide says No Data Available. The error says to update the WMC Update Log. But I can't find anything to do. It says there was an error updating.

Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?
 
#273 ·
Nevermind. I figured it out.

I re-opened the hack files I initially downloaded righ-clicking "run as administrator", and then selected Toronto.

Done and done.

Feels good to figure things out!
 
#274 ·
I am somewhat new at setting media center up. I hooked it up with no tuner yet and I have internet TV and netflicks. What I found is that as soon as I attach a tuner and do the live TV setup with a Canadian location, I loose all the internet TV stuff. I see a lot of discussion about hacks and things, I am not doing OTA and only using a tuner with STB attached through composite. Any ideas?

thanks
 
#275 ·
That is an expected behavior as Internet TV and the Netflix MC plug-in are not available in Canada or work for Netflix.ca. Therfore you must also be using a U.S. Netflix account and a service to get around the geo blocking for all that to work.

I don't think it will work the way you are thinking with a composite input but I will let the others with experience in setting that up to chime in. You will need to have an IRBlaster scenario setup in order to be able to change channels. There are a bunch of threads around here that covers all that stuff, just try a search.
 
#276 ·
Indeed like j0dest3r mentioned you would need to setup as USA with Netflix USA account and geounlock service for the Internet plugins to work under media center. If you go this route, since it would be a US setup you would not have your STB guide listings for your canadian cable or sat service by default. Your tuner must come with an IR blaster, so 7mc may be able to support that.

For getting guide listings to work while having a US setup, have a look at GuideTool and Peter Near's multiple listings hack for Windows 7 Media Center. You'll likely use one of these to make it work. Read back the posts in this thread, as many of these cover the case of a US setup + adding canadian channels in the guide by using Peter's hack.
 
#277 ·
Ok thanks, would this work:

In my basement I put a pc with 2 set top boxes and use a hauppauge card with 2 composite inputs. I setup wmc as Canada with 2 tuners to Rogers cable. All good so far for basement access, here I lose my Internet tv but that's ok.
Upstairs I have another pc setup as US so that I can get the US content, then I use your dvblink server and connect software that allows me to connect two WMC clients to access the live TV from the basement.

After writing this it sound like it won't work.
 
#278 ·
You can use an xbox360 as a client to your Windows media center PC to watch live TV and existing recordings. Can't go from one 7mc to another. Xbox360 is the only client box I know which will work for live TV. You could possibly set that one xbox to select which media center you access from multiple media center pcs, but you'd need to make changes in the xbox setup every time you switch which server you wish to access.
 
#279 ·
After looking at that DLNA server software you mention, it looks like it should work. You would have two instances of the DLNA server on the network one running on each PC. You would have to differentiate the names of each one but it should work assuming the front end will allow you to choose which one you want to connect to. I like that it works with Windows Media Player as a client. (outside of MS's own offerings) I haven't seen any DLNA server that uses it as a client. PlayOn as an example doesn't work with WMP11 but you can install a plug-in into Media Center to browse the PlayOn DLNA server from within it.
 
#280 ·
You've gotten good advice here, let me summarize what I think the key components are:

- You have a US VPN or DNS service which makes your network appear to be in the US
- You have a HTPC with two tuners and two STBs
- Set up that HTPC with a US zip code, all the guide listings will be wrong
- Use this hack to manually import Canadian guide listings http://experts.windows.com/w/experts_wiki/133.aspx

As for watching TV elsewhere in the house, personally I find that using an Xbox as a fully-functioning media center client with Live TV is the best and easiest. I've never used DVBLink for this purpose, but suspect it won't be the seamless experience your family is looking for.

-Pete
 
#282 ·
As for watching TV elsewhere in the house, personally I find that using an Xbox as a fully-functioning media center client with Live TV is the best and easiest.
There will soon be another option other than the Xbox as the Ceton Echo should be available before too long. This was designed to work with the Ceton "Q" entertainment gateway (which is useless to Canadians since it requires a CableCARD) but it will work as an extender with any Win7 MC system.

http://cetoncorp.com/products/echo/
 
#283 ·
Win7 WMC recording problem

Hi,

I'm in the Ottawa area and use WMC under W7. I thought WMC was great until I discovered an annoying problem. I can record everything including the PBS stations but when I try to record WNYF (CBS or Fox), my signal drops to 0 as soon as I click the record button. While not recording, I can watch it fine and recording WNYF with WinTV is not a problem. I admit the WNYF signal is not very strong but I can't see why recording makes it go away.

Anyone else experience this ?
 
#284 ·
Watching must be more forgiving with signal loss than recording. Try it later & later at night and see if it gets better. If it does then it's because your signal level is too low which totally makes sense for the weak WNYF-LD signal in Ottawa. Also, you would want to verify which channel you have in your guide is it WNYF-CD or WNYF-LD ? Make sure it's WNYF-LD for both -1 and -2, if needed remove it from the guide then add them back manually using the Add channels option with WNYF with virtual 28.1/2 and real 18 numbers.
 
#285 ·
I haven't experienced it, but can speculate as to what might be happening.

Media Center often uses one tuner to watch live tv and another tuner to record tv. It is possible that your second tuner isn't as sensitive or isn't properly connected to the antenna.

Let me walk you through something from memory (the exact steps probably aren't correct):
To see what tuners are set up for the channel, navigate to settings, guide, edit channels. Select the channel and then click on "sources"
You'll see a list of tuners and specific channels to tune to for that channel.
Check that list to make sure all the channels are correct and are real working tuners.
You can also reorder the tuner priority.

Let me know if that helps at all.

Pete
 
#286 ·
Please help with fresh WMC setup - already wasted 3 days on this

Dear Digital Home folks,

To make a long story short, I had an old upgraded Vista box with WMC working fine using Peter Near's great ATSC for Canada (Toronto) hack (thanks, Peter very much!). It started to BSOD because of an electrical spike. Bought a brand new Acer Desktop and a new Hauppage usb tuner and I can not get it to find channels in WMC setup no matter what I do. I even took the new desktop back to Future Shop and exchanged it for another one.

Hardware:
I am using a brand new Hauppage HVR 950Q USB stick (I originally had an 850 but when it wouldn't work, I went out and bought the 950 in desperation). The 850 still works in an old configured laptop.
I am also using a brand new ACER A8 AMD Quad Core with Radeon card and HDMI out and a 2 TB HD running Windows 7 Home Premium (fresh install).
I have a ChannelMaster professionally installed on my roof (by Sal's TV) - no amplifier. Worked great and still works with an old Windows 7 laptop I configured last year to run with the ATSC hack but I can't get the new Acer to work.


What I have done (several times)

1. Plugged in USB tuner card (auto download of drivers). I have also tried every permutation of downloading drivers from Hauppage, using CD drivers, Windows update drivers etc.
2. Run the two batch scripts for Peter Near's hack (EnableATSCandQAM.bat and USGuide.bat) using the "4" option for Toronto
3. Run WMC setup. It finds the tuner, tells me (as understood) no ATSC settings for my region and then it starts the search for channels. It finds none and asks me if I want to scan again. This has never happened to me before. On my old laptop I get about 27 channels, all pretty strong (I live not far from CTV tower).
4. I have reset WMC settings and when that didn't work I then reinstalled Windows itself twice for good measure. Nothing works.
5. Tried to get the buggy Hauppage WinTV 7 software to work. No joy.
6. In a moment of despair I even loaded a Mythbuntu Live CD to see if I could get a TV signal...
7. I'm at the end of my wits and time. I'm about to give up on my beloved WMC PVR setup and get a regular old TV.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks,
Chris.
 
#287 ·
Thats too bad. So the same co-ax plugged into the TV picks up channels but you disconnnect it and put the same cable into your Acer and no channels regardless of OS, Windows or Mythbuntu will pick up channels.
You also confirmed the Tuner works on another computer.

What about a different USB port on your Acer? I had a USB tuner that would randomly drop off line sometimes, that's why I switched to a network tuner. Try a USB port in the back if you're currently using one in the front.
 
#289 ·
Agree on trying the setup with a US zip code and no hack, I use 14174. Sometimes with the hack it finds no channels and you need add them manually, but I've never had an issue with direct us zip.

Secondly, try a signal tester. The Hauppauge might include one, or you can use TSReader and select BDA tuner.
 
#290 ·
Thanks everyone - I really appreciate the help. Since I tried setting up with a Canadian post code, it won't let me setup with an American Zip (I'm pretty sure it has to do with the DRM).

I'm doing a reinstall of Windows just to make sure I'm working with a crystal clean full install. It'll chug along while I'm out and I'll give this a shot tonight hack free.

Thanks again Peter for sharing your work with this community and for those that have helpfully replied. It is greatly appreciated.

I wish that more people would come to see WMC (properly setup) as the media powerhouse that it is so that MSFT would support ATSC in Canada.
 
#292 ·
WMC on Windows 8 seems to work the same as Windows 7 - no ATSC support for Canada, but it works fine for a U.S. Zip Code. I haven't tried pnears's hack yet.

I'm going to try Windows 8 RTM next week and see if I can get WMC to install (it's officially an extra cost add-on in the production version of Windows 8). If so, I'll try the hack then.
 
#293 ·
Cool, Let us know how you fare with Windows 8 Media Center. I am interested in knowing if the Netflix MCE plugin will work with my Netflix Canada subscription. Using the US setup at the moment, this is the only way i can see the Netflix plugin appear but it does not work with Netflix Canada service.

Overall even if they still don't support Canada OTA, i am lucky enough in Ottawa that it doesn't matter as we got all the channels in the US-based setup. I know that's not the case for everybody so let's cross our fingers on that front.
 
#294 ·
I tried Windows8 MC on a laptop with the previous to this release version. No Netflix Canada support in the Netflix plug-in and no ATSC support as per usual. Pnear's hack still worked. I had to manually add the two VHF HI channels as well (in Edmonton) as it wouldn't scan and them automatically like the UHF channels. I also had this issue on Windows 7. Next week I will do the same tests with the RTM bits as well once they are released to TechNet. Dr. Dave perhaps we can swap notes here! ;) I don't anticipate any differences with the RTM, but do hope to be pleasantly surprised.

BTW...There is supposed to be a Metro Netflix App released at time of launch I doubt it will be there for the 15th but it should be here in the coming weeks. Hopefully Metro can be navigated remote control without too much effort.
 
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