Fix: Hauppauge Colossus in Media Center with Virgin Media–Work around for channels 101 – 105

As I mentioned some time back I have been testing a Hauppauge Colossus PCI-E HD Video Capture card in My Media Center PC talking to a Virgin Media V+ box. This has worked amazingly well. Unlike my previous experience with the very similar HD-PVR I have not used any external software other than that supplied by Hauppauge to get this working (i.e. No need for DVBLink – although DVBLogic do have a specific plug in which does work well) In this case I only used Hauppauge’s add in for Media Center ( http://www.hauppauge.com/site/support/support_colossus.html choose for Windows Media Center)

I’ll cover more of the functionality in my later review but I wanted to get out a fix/work round for an issue I discovered.

I had come across this before in my HD-PVR review in that Virgin Media has BBC 1 on channel 101 BBC2 on Channel 2 etc but Media Center’s guide data sees these channels as 1, 2 etc. This causes the IR-Blaster interface a real issue in that when it tries to change the channel to BBC 1 it only sends 1 not 101. I tried many things to solve this including editing the Channel number both internally in Media Center and also using http://1geek1tool.com/ ‘s fabulous Guide Tool but in all cases the IR Blaster still only sent a single digit. After much discussion with Hauppauge they have admitted the issue and are in talks with Microsoft over it. In the mean time they have offered a work-round which I’ve tried and it appears to work well.

The work round is not for the faint hearted or those who are not competent in a text editor but if you do feel confident it is certainly worth a go.

Copy the following file to the desktop

c:\program data\Hauppauge\MediaCenterService\{xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx}.XML   Garry: This is a hidden folder so you will need to use Folder Options, View Show Hidden files, folders and drives. It should be noted that the {xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx}. above is going to be a random series of characters on your pc (technically a GUID) but there will only be on XML file in that folder – that is the one to choose)

Open this in Notepad and edit the channel numbers (in two places ChannelID and channel) e.g. BBC Two which was previously 2 change to 102 Garry: I found it was easiest to do a search for “1” “2” etc.

<tune:ChannelID ChannelID=”102″>
<tune:TuningSpace xsi:type=”tune:ChannelIDTuningSpaceType” Name=”DC65AA02-5CB0-4d6d-A020-68702A5B34B8″ NetworkType=”{DC65AA02-5CB0-4d6d-A020-68702A5B34B8}” />
<tune:Locator xsi:type=”tune:ATSCLocatorType” Frequency=”-1″ PhysicalChannel=”-1″ TransportStreamID=”-1″ ProgramNumber=”1″ />
<tune:Components xsi:type=”tune:ComponentsType” />
</tune:ChannelID>
<ps:Service xmlns:ps=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/2006/eHome/MediaCenter/PBDAService.xsd” name=”BBC TWO” callSign=”BBC TWO” ppv=”false” subscribed=”true” codec=”H.264″ channel=”102″ matchname=”BBC TWO”></ps:Service>
<Idx value=”32″ />

Save this file and mark Read only. Garry – Really important to mark as read only – use right-click on file then properties to do this

Copy back to c:\program data\Hauppauge\MediaCenterService\

Go to Settings –> TV –> TV Signal-> Scan for more channels. Garry: this is in Media Center – I’ve added some clarification to the original Hauppauge instructions in blue.

Click Delete All then yes

Click Start Scan

it will then read your changes in and BBC TWO will be 102.

Navigate back to c:\program data\Hauppauge\MediaCenterService\{xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx}.XML and make it NOT read only.  It is unclear when you should do this – I saved TV settings in Media Center and exited Media Center and then marked the file as not read only using properties. UPDATE: This doesn’t seem to work consistently – I’ve actually it works better if you do not remove the read-only unless you want to update the channel list.

I have to say I am impressed that Hauppauge have put effort into finding what is probably world-wide a fairly obscure error and providing a work-round. Having said that for the UK Virgin Cable is probably going to be one of the most common use-cases for the Colossus and it is really good to have a temporary fix.  I say temporary because if the Virgin Cable line up changes you are going to have to repeat this process. Also it should be noted you will have to run Scan for more channels twice when you want to update. Once to update the XML with the new channels and the second time after repeating the above steps to update the XML again.

Hopefully Hauppauge and Microsoft will come up with a better long-term solution but for now this works and makes the card very usable in the UK.

I also had one further thought which I haven’t tried yet which is that it might be possible to edit the XML to add the several channels that are on Virgin Media but not in Microsoft’s guide data. I have already used it to remove some channels I didn’t want.