Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Mr. Franken goes to Washington.

Seven months after his election, Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled unanimously in favor of Al Franken in the disputed U.S. Senate race.

This is 60 votes for the Democrats. Let's see something get done with healthcare.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Microsoft MCE fails users with major error: won't list Digital Sub Channels

Today is the last day of analog TV broadcast. Yet, Microsoft has still not fixed a well known, well documented error in Windows Media Center for Vista and XP. Apparently the bug is fixed in Windows 7 beta, but that doesn't help 99.9% of us right now.

This bug has been documented everywhere, all over the internet. For a very long time now.

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistamedia/thread/52c101b6-9cae-45f4-81e4-d7370bcbb54a

The bug prevents you from getting ATSC (over the air) tv listings for sub channels. For example, channel 13-1 will show in the listings. But channel 13-2, 13-3 and 13-4 will all have exactly the same TV program listings as 13-1. This means that you can't record from the sub channels. It's a huge pain in the ass for people who rely on over the air TV reception.

Yet Microsoft doesn't respond, doesn't fix the problem. They seemingly could care less.

I am told the only way to fix this is to lie to Media Center and tell it you have a cable TV connection, and then to tediously remove all of the channels manually. Yeah, right.

Come on Microsoft, get with it!!

KFME Digital Channel is now 13.

Loyal readers (if there are any) will realize that I often post solutions to weird problems. Life is full of weird problems, some of them very small and very specific but all of them annoying.

Last week I had trouble with the TV card in my media computer. We use it as a DVR with Media Center to record atsc over the air TV shows.

We receive PBS through KFME. KFME recently switched from digital channel 22 to digital channel 13. Maybe most set top boxes can redo the scan easy enough, however, I was lost. I could not find channel 13 programs. Googling around, all the information I could find (including FCC filings) showed KFME on channel 22. Finally I called the bastards and asked them what was going on. They said they switched to digital channel 13, and finally I was able to finally make that adjustment manually to the file:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\eHome\EPG\prefs\atscprefs.xml

It all works for now. I hope this was helpful to you.