I've been using Vista's Media Center software for the past couple months to watch & record my local ATSC HD channels (using an AverMedia A180 ATSC/QAM tuner). Media Center's supported ATSC functionality has been working great. (Don't get me started on QAM in Media Center...) That is until a couple of weeks ago. I had Media Center configured to record new episodes of "Lost" each week off the Phoenix ABC affiliate, KNXV-DT 15. However starting 2 or 3 weeks ago, it started to miss the Lost scheduled recordings. Once I finally got annoyed enough to look into the issue, I stumbled across a couple of links that helped me resolve the issue. Apparently, the media center guide had the wrong frequency assigned to this station. The episode guide had channel 15 assigned to frequency 15. According to smarter people on the internet, this frequency should be 56. So either the episode guide recently updated with the wrong frequency or the local station changed their frequency. Either way the fix is the same. If you edit the XML config file for the episode guide, you can remove the problem channel, then use the media center guide configuration GUI to manually add the channel with the correct frequency. So here's step by step procedure that worked for me.
(note: the process below was in Vista Ultimate Edition. I've never used XP's media center so the process might be slightly different.)
- Close Media Center completely
- The guide file is at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\eHome\EPG\prefs\atscchannels.xml
- Open that file to edit in a plain text editor
- delete the line that contains the problem channel
- save and close the file
- open Media Center
- Settings->TV->Guide->Add Missing Channels->Add DTV Channel
- Enter channel number. (in my case, 15-1 for channel 15)
- Enter Frequency. (in my case, 56)
- Enter Channel Name (KNXV-DT in my case)
