How time flies…

I knew I had not posted in a bit, but it surprised me that it had been 12 days since my last post.  I’ve been extremely busy over the past couple of weeks, so I guess time has just slipped past me.  I really haven’t done a whole lot in that time as far as HTPCs are concerned though.  The only thing of note would probably have been over the course of this weekend.  I’ve been doing a lot of recording of PBS shows for my kids lately, so I’ve been doing a lot of re-visiting to my HDHomeRun and Media Center recording settings/configurations.

In that process, I’ve had to completely reset my Media Center guide due to some channel swapping that Comcast had done over the past few months.  It had become much too large a mess for me to do manually, so I found a quick an easy guide at Hack7MC that allowed me to do it.  Once I was back to the default, I dreaded the manual assignment of the 100+ channels that 7MC refuses to discover during its internal channel scan.  That’s what lead me to the discovery of the hdhomerun_wmc_sync.exe utility that is not part of the SiliconDust Start Menu application items.  I rarely visit the SiliconDust site for anything more than the occasional check for new beta releases, so this little utility went completely unnoticed by me.  Basically, after you’ve scanned for channels in the HDHomeRun Setup Utulity and done the initial setup and scan in Media Center, running the WMC Sync utility will populate your guide with all matching channels found in your HDHR scan.  When I say “matching”, I mean all channels that have a call sign that the Media Center guide recognizes (use the guide for your area available from Zap2It.com).

Once complete, you can go into Media Center, check your guide listings and everything should be there (provided your station call signs all had a match for Microsoft).  I think I only had to manually add two stations – History International and SyFy.  It works terrificly.  It did introduce a very annoying problem, however.  A problem that is very difficulty to find a solution for unless you live on the SiliconDust forums or have some excellent Google skills.

When you run the WMC Sync program, it is very good at populating your guide…I’ve already covered that.  What I found though, was that all the channels it adds are now incapable of recording.  For example, if you go directly into the guide and choose to record a channel that has been added by the WMC Sync utility, it simply won’t.  Adding a scheduled recording works, but it will not show any programs to be recorded when you check…i.e. it doesn’t work.  I racked my brain on this for a good hour or two this weekend until I finally came across this thread at the SiliconDust forums while Googling.  Basically, you go into your Guide Settings, choose Edit Channels, disable all channels, Save and then re-enable those channels you want to keep.  This fixes the inability to record to your newly mapped channels.  It took me a half hour just find that thread again so I could link it.

I’m sure SiliconDust is working on a fix for this, but I haven’t seen any new beta releases in a month or more.  They’re usually pretty active on that front, but I guess the new CableCard is their new distraction.  Hopefully they don’t forget about us HDHR owners, even though Comcast is probably going to make the device pretty much  useless to all of us as far as QAM goes.