May 2nd is the launch date of FreeView. That’s when TV3, C4 and the appropriate Radio New Zealand stations all jump onto the Optus D1 satellite. Currently off the satellite you can get Māori TV, TV One and TV 2.

So, I’ve been busy fixing up my MythBox to get ready for the launch. Still need a larger hard drive, but put in a new PSU as the old one blew out while we were away (and it didn’t record Vicar of Dibley dammit!).

Previously I had been having troubles tuning into the currently single FreeView transponder and been getting TV off the Sky ones. This was because MythTV was recording the values differently for some unknown reason. But I found out with help from the MythTV NZ mailing list. After scanning the channels and picking them up in mythtv-setup, you’ll have to dig into MySQL. As I had PHPMyAdmin installed on my personal computer, I just modified the configuration to use the MythBox’s server. Otherwise, you can just SSH in and use MySQL on the MythBox itself.

The database is called mythconverg, and the username and password can be found by going to Settings » General in MythTV.

If you look in dtv_multiplex, look for the row with the correct frequency 12483000. Delete all the other rows and take note of the mplexid as we’ll need this later. Make sure symbolrate is 22500000 and the polarity is h. modulation also tends to be auto and MythTV should have at least picked up the correct fec as 3/4.

Don’t ask me why MythTV bungled all those values that you typed into the setup to scan the channels!

Jump into channel and have a look to make sure each row has mplexid equal to the one that we took note of above.

Remember, this is what you do after scanning the channels. If you cannot scan, then check your DiSEq settings, making sure that the LNB LOF is 11300000 for both its min and max settings.