Channel Mapping for Ceton tuners

[ckewinjones]

I have some questions about setting up the channel lineup for the Ceton tuners. (Actually, I find the whole channel setup process confusing, so it is not specific to Ceton.)

I added the four Ceton tuners as video sources, and specified our cable provider (Comcast Digital, Chelmsford MA). Then when I do a full channel scan, I get results which seem odd to me.

Many of the channels are listed and marked as enabled; and others are listed and marked as disabled. The ones that are disabled seem to be the premium channels (HBO, etc), which presumably are marked as Copy Once or No Copy. So it is understandable that they would be disabled. However, not all of the channels which are enabled are marked Copy Freely -- so there are channels in the lineup which are enabled, but are not actually usable with the Ceton tuner.

Also, there are a lot of channels which show up in the list with channel name = OK and channel number = OK. These channels seem to be completely meaningless. I suppose that these don't hurt anything, since presumably they could never be selected using the Program Guide, but it is annoying to have garbage in the channel list.

My goal is to define a channel lineup for each Ceton tuner that includes all of the channels, and only the channels, that the tuner can successfully tune and SageTV can successfully record. That means that any channel that is not marked CopyFreely needs to be removed from the lineup. The channel scan that SageTV does during video source setup does not do that for me; it seems that I will have to tweak the lineup by hand.

Given that I have to do that, I want to make sure that I understand the data that I have to supply for each channel. As I understand it, there are five items of data for each channel:

• Logical channel number: number that appears in the program guide, which you actually use to tune the channel
• Physical Channel number: "real" channel number
• Station Name: Call sign or other station identifier (will appear in the program guide)
• Station ID: Identifier by which the channel is known to the EPG provider
• Description

What I do not understand is what the difference is between the logical channel number and the physical channel number. Are they ever different? And if they are different, how do I determine what the correct physical channel number is? Also, how do I determine the Station ID if I don't have it?

I am sorry if this is a bit rambling, but if anyone knows the answers to the questions in the last paragraph, I should be much obliged.