I have a question about how DTV tuning works. Sorry if this is long winded and too basic a question, but DTV is new to me...

I have a philips 3575h dvd recorder (june 25, 2007 with latest firmware on arrival), and I plug my Time Warner cable (NYC) wire directly into the philips recorder. I ran the auto channel preset, and it seems to work fine. It found lots of channels. I dont seem to have any problem with loosing channels. and I think I understand the concept of the major/minor channels.

The first channel I get is 1.4, which comes up with wpix-TheTube. I press channel up and the next channels in order are: 1.5=Fox, 1.11=wpix, and then I get 1.4=NBC-HD.

Why are there two 1.4 channels? When I try to set up the timer to record 1.4, I get wpix and not NBC (so I missed Heroes!).

Is this a philips 3575 issue, or a cable issue, or not an issue, and I just dont understand DTV?

By the way, if I continue to hit channel up, I get: 1.7, 1.28. 1.29, 1.2, 1.13, 1.14, 1.15. Why are they not in order? All the other channels seem fine, all in the right order and no dups.

thanks for any insights
antong

I'm not familiar with the unit firsthand, but have you tried deleting the channel with "The Tube" from your channel list, and then scheduling for NBC? If not, I guess it's worth a try.

Actually, I'm surprised you'd even be getting "The Tube" - as they just ceased operations a couple of nights ago. Maybe if you do a rescan that channel won't even show up now and your problem will have taken care of itself. Might as well try that first.

Those weird channel numbers and order are the local digital channels being remapped to your QAM tuner. And the reason there are duplicates is because they come in analog and native 1080i/720p/480i digital. The ones in order with normal channel numbers are the analog channels, which are being picked up by the NTSC tuner. The digital channels are usually mapped oddly like that unless you use one of their tuners, which will map them either to their familiar channel numbers, or some regular, higher ones.

A heads up - be prepared for those digital channels to move around on occasion, and to have to do a rescan. Many cable companies have a habit of doing that every now and then - probably just to frustrate those who don't use/rent their boxes. There seems like no other logical reason to do it.

On the 3575, you can use the Manual Channel Preset menu to delete channels. Open that menu and go to the channel you want to delete and select the "Delete" checkbox. It takes a short time for it to activate and put the checkmark in the box.

Caution: On my analog cable, I'm only able to delete the major channel (1,2,etc.), which deletes ALL subchannels starting with that major number. However, on digital cable I believe you'll see a slightly different menu than I do. The top of the menu box on mine shows the channels number as 1 ( ) where there is no number in the parentheses. It's supposed to show the virtual channel number assigned by the cableco. Your menu should have a number in the parentheses to identify each subchannel, so you should be able to delete by subchannel and retain all the other subchannels???

Question should go in the 'Reception' thread.

antong77; Here I thought Samsung had a market for the 1.1 problem. Looks as it takes a backseat bigtime. Sheesh, what a mess.
Someone should tell these companies there is no channel one.
All of this would be solved if mapping could be turned off as it can be with some PC tuner cards.

BTW, welcome to the forums.

Thanks for the input.
TheTube is out, but another wpix station is still on the first 1.4
You can delete major channel, and all minors go with it. I dont see how to delete minor channels.

So thanks to all, but I am still looking for an answer, if one exists.
antong

I dont see how to delete minor channels.Unless they show up as separate channels (entries) in a channel editor that the receiver has.

Why are there two 1.4 channels?

TWC screwed up. They're the ones that set their QAM channel numbers, and somehow they've missed the fact that they've assigned 1.4 to two different channels. Somebody should tell them about it so they can fix it.

Your tuner can tell them apart internally because they're actually on different physical channels. The 1.4 is a virtual channel number which is encoded into the channel's PSIP data stream. When your tuner finds an ATSC signal on a physical channel, it extracts the virtual channel number from the PSIP data and shows you that channel number instead of the "real", physical channel number.

So your tuner can show you the two channels in the channel listing, and you can probably get to both of them using the channel-up or channel-down button, but you can go "directly" to only one of them by punching in (or programming) the channel number.

jtbell - this makes sense to me

Thanks to all for the insights