On 4/4/2011 1:06 PM Ian Field spake thus:

"David Nebenzahl" wrote in message
s.com...

So one of my local TV stations seemingly stopped sending program
information data--you know, the text that says what's on, what's
going to be on, and explaining in more detail what's on. Landing on
that channel, display simply showed "- No program information -".
(BTW, this seems to be the default for all of the minor little
public TV stations around here, not including the big PBS stations
which are diligent about supplying this information.)

OK, no big deal, but slightly annoying, so I fired off an email to
the station, alerting them to this situation and asking them if
this was due to an omission at their end. (I confess I really don't
know what that information is called, or how it gets supplied at
their end. All I know is that it is somehow transmitted as part of
the DTV datastream.)

Well, a day or two later, the program information started appearing
for that station. I figured it *might* have been on account of my
email--big slaps on the back for me as an Alert Citizen!--but since
they hadn't replied, I had no way of knowing.

Then a couple days after that I got a reply back. The station's
operations manager wrote and told me that they (the station) was
supplying that information, and therefore if I wasn't seeing it, it
was probably due to a problem at my end. He suggested doing a
complete rescan (not an "update scan") on my DTV box.

I wrote back, and he replied to that. Here's what he said, in part:


Nothing changed on our end. However it is not unheard of for
set-top-boxes to need to reload the PSIP tables for a channel
once in a while. Forcing a rescan forces the tables to reload.
Eventually they will usually reload on their own which is
probably what happened in your case.

(I had done nothing to my DTV box this whole time.)

So does anyone know if this is correct? Now there's another station
(one of the big networks, not a local independent) that's missing
its program info. Is it possible that my DTV box would selectively
omit this information for just one or a few stations? Every other
station shows this info for me, with the exceptions noted above.

IME DVB-T STBs seem particularly prone to mains borne noise and spikes
corrupting the various bits of NVR data, you could try a mains conditioning
socket strip to clean up the supply or run it through a UPS - handy for
power outages that would mess up recordings on a PVR, otherwise doing the
occasional re-scan is not such a big deal.

Are you sure of this, or is this just hand-waving? (Like the old "reboot
your computer" advice of the techie on the other end of the phone, no
matter what the problem.)

I ask because after doing a rescan, *another* channel still shows no
program information, so obviously the scan did nothing to correct that.
I still have no idea if the problem is at their end or my end, but the
scan didn't help.

Does someone here *actually know* how this information is handled,
propagated, etc?


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