From the link you sent (https://forum.silicondust.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=72479)
happens quite often with clear qam cable, in some other countries they don’t use such channel number thus all are in the 5000s
So what the poster there is saying is that with clear QAM cable and in many countries they don’t use/broadcast virtual channel numbers and so all the channels are in the 5000s. To me this means it doesn’t have to do with HDHR but has to do with the data available to the HDHR on the cable signal.
This wikipedia article says the same thing. Virtual channel - Wikipedia
In other parts of the world, such as Europe, virtual channels are rarely used or needed, as TV stations there identify themselves by name, not by RF channel or callsign
Based on how a normal cable box works…I figure there must be some additional data on the cable line…for instance guide data. I would guess that guide data is connected to the frequency mapping of the different channels so a user can view the guide and tune selected channels…effectively creating a channel map. However I don’t know anything about the DVB-C spec, so I don’t know if HDHR could access this guide data on the wire or not and I don’t know if it would help as it may only include channel names/order…not the underlying program IDs that Plex is using in their EPGs. I do know that as far as I can tell HDHR doesn’t do anything to present guide data…if they did that would sure make things easier right (just use the EPG direct from the cable provider).
So without this and without virtual channels…it seems that the plex idea of automated EPG mapping is not going to work outside the US?
If auto-mapping worked 99.9% of the time, I agree it wouldn’t make sense to invest at all in the UX of the mapping tool. The fact the error messages don’t update and the user has to look in browser dev tools to see which channel mapping was duplicated…or close the window and start over…is a prime example of the interface not being well tested.
Perhaps somehow I am just a crazy outlier…but I figured with KabelDeutschland and the HDHR that would be a pretty standard setup. Hard to imagine I am in the 0.01% especially given this has always been a problem through multiple firmware updates and channel rescans.
I also think that the fact plex is breaking the DVR (the 404 on the guide) without any warning or alert to the user is really crappy. Even if automapping worked perfectly, the DVR gets silently broken due to plex updating EPGs on the server and has to be deleted and recreated. So it isn’t just the channel mapping that has lousy usability here…it is multiple things around the DVR/EPG management.
Do you have many users in Germany with HDHR? I would figure you would given the investment you seem to making with various EPGs. Or is HDHR the wrong/bad hardware to use with plex and most German users are using something else? Would be happy for a tip if there is something that works much better.
It sounds to me like these 5000 channels mappings are going to happen anywhere that the cable providers don’t do virtual channels. it sounds like that is very common outside the US and on clear QAM cable. So in those cases your automated channel mapping won’t work.
I’d be happy to learn something new and perhaps this really is just a hardware limitation of HDHR and most Germans aren’t using HDHR and so I am in the 0.01%. Thanks!
