I spent sometime resurrecting my beloved media center from the neglect it suffered this summer.  True to my eclectic way of going through hobbies like a womanizer goes through women, I had nearly talked myself out of doing anything further with the machine.  I even contemplated completely abandoning it.

Fortunately, shorter days and cooler (albeit slight) weather has returned me to my senses.  All of those televisions shows I bid adieu to in May are drawing nigh.  I can see the silhouette of season premieres appearing on the horizon, galloping like wild horses.

With this new sense of urgency I decided the best approach would be to simply backup everything and start fresh.  I used the Windows Easy File and Settings Transfer utility for the first time. It smoothly backed up everything to one gigantic, 175 GB file on my external hard drive.  As my media center has been mostly non-functional for months I decided it would also be a good idea to skip backing up all of those shows I recorded last Winter/Spring and will never watch again.

Faced with the decision of whether or not to install the 32 bit or 64 bit version of Windows 7 I made the decision to give 64 bit a chance.  I have never done this before due to my fear that plugin and driver support for x64 will be weaker.  The thirst for a new experience helped me over this hurdle however.

All of this being said, the installation and setup were completely without hitch.  I did not find any plugins or drivers lacking x64 support.  Except, that is, FrontView.

FrontView is notoriously out of date, the last update being released 11/20/2006.  In fact, before I even installed Windows I did some preliminary research as to whether or not it would work.  I found no report concerning Windows 7, but I did find one report that it did not work with Vista 64 bit.  As alternatives exist I decided to proceed.

To my surprise, FrontView did install and connecting to my LCD required no effort on my part. It simply does not track media center’s session data.  It simply displays the default text/time.  A few hours of troubleshooting proved fruitless. As it stands I have posted on TheGreenButton in hopes that someone else has already tried this and succeeded.

Sadly, not only have FrontView’s developers refused to release updates they also ignore support requests. Something I figured out a few e-mails ago.  It would not be an issue if I hadn’t already paid for the pro version of their software.

I do not understand why some invest hundreds of hours into developing a product only to abandon it once a user base forms.

I can appreciate the time and effort required by even small projects, but developers have some responsibility to their projects, especially if they continue to sell them and advertise their support of them.

A year and a half ago I bought a giant aerial antenna for the sole purpose of receiving clear OTA reception of local stations in media center.  In this pursuit, I had very little troubles.  The setup has worked like a charm and I haven’t had to touch it for months on end.

That was until a few weeks ago when I started having difficulty receiving a few stations.  It seemed that I could only get strong reception on one channel if I agreed to not get good reception on other channels.  This is obviously unacceptable.

Yesterday I rushed home from work to try to play with the antenna positioning one last time before Chuck.   Fully 30 minutes later I resigned myself to failure.   

Now you have to understand–my whole setup is predicated on the success of this antenan. If the antenna falls down, I don’t watch TV…period.  I pay Comcast as an ISP and that’s it.   Being unable to resolve reception issues I decided to try something new: ClearQAM. 

I have not used ClearQAM in the past because:

1. I wasn’t sure I received any stations as I’m not paying for any TV package. 
2. I didn’t want to accept the degeredation in quality that Comcast imposes. (Cable companies rather selfishly compress HD content)
3. For most of my HTPC’s life,  ClearQAM was not a native option in media center. 

So last night I optimistically hooked up the cable connection to my tuners and went through the TV setup wizard again.  The first problem I had was in the proper detection of my tuner.  Windows 7 didn’t recognize my Hauppauge HVR-1600 as a ClearQAM tuner.  Fortunately I found these instruction which helped me modify the registry to get around this.

Having succesfully completed the wizard, I found that I had a few stations, whose channel numbers and guide data were completely wrong, and didn’t have a few other stations.  After playing around with it for a good while, I found the this guide that got me 90% there. 

In short, Windows Media Center in Windows 7 may miss some channels in its scan. And it will most likely not know what those channels are if it does find them.   You can use SiliconDust’s webpage to figure out what channels you should be getting.  Using the “Add Missing Channels” page in setup, you can add the missing ClearQAM channels with the correct QAM modulation.  (Left most column on SiliconDust’s page).  You should also note that SiliconDust’s page displays channel data for both OTA and digital cable. You’ll want to scroll down to get to the digital cable listings. 

It will also be very helpful to know what channels you want to be getting.  For instance, I knew I wanted WSLS (Channel 10.1 NBC in my area), so I searched that page for WSLS and added the channels that seemed to match. (In my case there were some duplicate entries that I was only able to weed out after figuring out which ones worked and which ones had the content I wanted.)

Once you have added all the missing channels (or you think you have) go to “Edit Guide” and find the channels you have added.  You’ll want to do two things once you’re here.  You’ll want to change the channel number to right one.  (For instance, NBC on my setup was ClearQAM channel 64-4 but I wanted it to be 10.1 as this was the official channel number).  To do this, select the channel name (to the right of the channel number and checkbox) and press Enter.  This displays the settings for this channel.   Change the channel number as desired and press save, then go to “Edit Listing” and type in the call letters for the station you want.   Be sure to be as specific as possible.   If your channel is WSLS-DT, select that and not WSLS on the off chance the analog station has different programming than the digital station. 

You should also be sure to differentiate between WSLS-DT and WSLS-DT2 and the like.   If you can’t find the proper call sign for a station, look it up online.   In my case, I receive a station called “The CW”.  Looking online I determined that the correct call sign was WWCW. 

It’s a process of trial and error, but once you have it setup you won’t have to worry about it anymore.

I apologize for the lack of screen shots in this post.  I’m not near a media center, but wanted to get this written while it was still fresh.