Give Us QAM Channel Mapping!!!

I can't belive the S3 has been on the market for a year now and we still don't have channel mapping. WTF?!?

So I'm watching OAK/DEN and there's a weather delay. Flip over to DAL/MIA to see how that game's going. Black screen. Down a channel, perfect picture. Back to FOX, nothing. Some checking shows I'm now missing 3 HD network channels. FOX, ABC, and KCOP are gone. All I can assume is that Cox has changed the channel mappings and my cards didn't get updated. Restart, no change. Nothing's changed on my system but I can't watch the game in HD.

Assuming I'm right and the channels have moved, maybe my cards will get updated. Maybe they won't. But there's nothing I can do about it right now. If I could do a channel scan and override the mapping manually, I could at least have a temporary fix while I'm waiting for a truck roll. I assume they'll insist on sending out a technician but I can't be sure yet. I have to wait until my roommate gets home to make the call. Since the cable's in his name, I can't make requests of any kind. Not even "Can you just verify that the account and cards are configured properly?"

My cards appear to be working fine other than those three network HD channels. All of my HBO/SHO channels come in fine (including HD). My other premium HD channels (ESPN1/2, UHD, Discovery, etc.) all come in fine.

I have no doubt the cable company does this crap to cause problems for cablecard devices. I've never seen a remapping get messed up on their receivers. Tivo, you need to give your customers the tools they need to fight this BS.

(EDIT)

BTW, my temporary fix will be to hook up an OTA antenna and see if I can replace the missing networks that way until this can be fixed. I'm supposedly within range of all three broadcast antennas (and several others). If they insist on a truck roll, I may just stick with OTA rather than take half a day off work and risk having an ignorant tech cause even more problems. That's a pretty lame.

 

Thanks for the tip. I'll give that a shot after the evening game. (Fortunately, NBC's still working.)

The season passes and scheduled recordings were fine because they get updated to match the new channel lineup. Each network gets a unique ID in the database and that's how the recordings are handled. They're not set to "record Channel 15 at 7pm". They're "record feed 9182 at 7pm" where 9182 is the ID for CNN. If CNN is channel 45 in the new lineup, that's the channel that gets recorded.

Same as the channel mapping for digital networks. The difference is that, back in the analog days, moving channels around was very rare and a big event that was accompanied by mass mailings to all customers with new lineup cards. Lots of lead time for companies like Tivo to prepare and it was rare for a cable company to have more than one change per year, usually only effecting a few channels. Now that it's all digital, they can move a channel with a few keystrokes and they do it quite often and, from what I can tell, for no particular reason. They don't tell anyone because it's all invisible as long as the digital receivers get updated properly.

In theory, it shouldn't matter since the receivers are updated automatically and nearly instantaneously. But the cable companies don't have a very good reputation when it comes to cablecards.

 

FYI, I tried the "provider swap" and it didn't help. Still missing the same channels, still have all of my premium content. Off the the hardware store to see if they have any antennas.

(EDIT)

Ended up with a Philips MANT510 amplified indoor antenna which picked up 76 OTA signals with a little tweaking. Not KCOP, tho. That one's in and out. Got the rest of the networks, some other locals, a lot of "PBS" stations, and a lot of foreign language programming, most of it in the 80-90 range on the signal strength meter.

It'll do if I can't get this fixed without a truck roll.