During the review of the Black Gold BGT3620 tuner, I found that none of the four Freeview HD channels had any information in the Media Center Guide. Fortunately there is a work-around for 3 of the 4 channels.
The Problem
There is no Guide data for the four Freeview HD channels.
So without data in the Guide, it makes it very difficult to chose what to watch, find out more the programme, etc.
The particular problem affects all four Freeview HD Channels:
- BBC1 HD
- ITV1 HD
- CHANNEL 4 HD
- BBC HD
This is not a fault of the BGT3620, its actually a problem between Microsoft and Freeview HD, and until it is solved you have two options. Either live with no guide data (which isn’t very appealing) or perform a fairly simple work-around that will solve the problem on 3 of the 4 HD Channels (the one that it doesn’t work on is BBC HD).
The fix uses the standard definition guide data as a source.
The Work-Around
Fire up Windows Media Center, select Tasks, then Settings, then TV, then Guide.
Then click on Edit Channels.
Scroll down until you find the first of your HD channels and double-click on it.
Then click on Edit listings.
You will see it says that there are no listings for the this channel.
Scroll down through the list until you find the standard definition listing for the channel you are fixing and click on it.
Make sure you select the Copy Listings From Channel x (being the SD channel) to Channel y (being the HD channel) otherwise you will overwrite the working data.
When you perform this action, the channel is renamed to that of the SD Channel, in this case Channel 4, so just rename it back to Channel 4 HD and click Save.
You will now see Guide data for the channel.
Perform the same steps for BBC1 HD and ITV1 HD and the rest of the guide data will appear (except for BBC HD).
Hopefully now that Freeview HD cards are becoming available, Freeview HD and Microsoft will fix this issue properly and we won’t need a workaround and all four channels will be shown correctly!
And thanks to Tranquil for the information (and the card)!
New UWHS Post : How To Fix The Missing Guide Data for Freeview HD Channels in Windows Media Center – http://tinyurl.com/23a7e3s
How To Fix The Missing Guide Data for Freeview HD Channels in …: During the review of the Black Gold BGT3620 t… http://bit.ly/hkpfVz
Using Windows Home Server – How To Fix The Missing Guide Data for Freeview HD Channels in Windows Media Center http://bit.ly/gBZEnz
How To Fix The Missing Guide Data for Freeview HD Channels in Windows Media Center: During the review … http://bit.ly/hkpfVz #WHS #SBS
How To Fix The Missing Guide Data for Freeview HD Channels in Windows Media Center : http://tinyurl.com/23a7e3s
You should be able to do the same for BBC HD, especially if you have a DVB-S card installed, as I get listing for that on DVB-S. I think you can also do it if you don’t have DVB-S, but not sure how.
Thanks! I also found it useful to swap the channels around, so that the HD channels are given priority on the channel list. For example, if you change the HD BBC One to Channel 1, WMC will detect that a channel already exists there, and it will give you the option of swapping the channels.
By changing the channel numbers, you can also group similar channels together and push those crappy shopping channels way down the list of channels so that you aren’t constantly scrolling around them (or alternatively you can disable those channels).
Excellent adivce. I had this problem today (feb 2016) and now it is fixed!