There’s not much detail on how to get a Windows 7 Media Center with Ceton’s InfiniTV 4 to tune in a channel from a ZeeVee zvBox modulator. I hope this post will be useful to others that find themselves in my situation.
BACKGROUND
For people that are not familiar with the ZeeVee box. In a nutshell, it takes a 720p HD source (or SD) and turns it into a digital cable channel (ClearQAM) which you can tune into from any “digital cable ready” TV in your home. I created a new channel, 135 (it’s an open channel in my Comcast system) and wanted to be able to tune into this channel via my MCE and anywhere I have a media extender. This simple task turned out to be more difficult than I expected. Because digital cable systems can adjust cable channel lineups/guide data automatically, adding and removing channels is not something MCE natively allows you to override.
GETTING THE NEW CHANNEL IN THE GUIDE
Step 1 to getting the ZeeVee zvBox 170 to work is adding the channel to the guide so MCE knows the channel exists and something you can tune to. You need to download a 3rd Party tool called “Guide Tool” by 1geek1tool. This little tool is what allows you to add a channel to the guide (it’s actually a very powerful tool for other purposes as well).
Install it and do the following:
- Click the tuner icon
- New window opens with list of installed tuners
- Highlight first tuner
- Click “add channel”
- Name your channel (e.g. MAV-TV)
- Enter channel number that will display in the guide (e.g. 135)
- Enter the QAM channel (e.g. 135)
- …repeat this for each of the tuners you have installed
- Next, in the left panel you should see the channel(s) you added — if you have 4 tuners you will see 4 channels.
- Shift-Click and select all 4 new channels then right-click and click “merge”
- That’s it for Guide Tool
GETTING THE CETON TO TUNE THE CHANNEL
Now you should see channel 135 in the guide but when you select it you will probably get a black screen or “no signal is found” message. This is normal because the Ceton tuner knows nothing about the new channel as it gets it’s channel lineup from the cable system.
To add the new channel to the Ceton tuner do the following:
- Find the IP address of the Ceton tuner
- Then open your browser and enter the following (replacing XXX with the IP address of your tuner) http://192.168.1.XXX/Services/AddChannel.html
- You will now see a screen which allows you to enter a channel manually
- For channel 135 enter the following (if using other channels you’ll need to find the QAM frequency from here):
- Frequency “861000” (kHz)
- Program number “1”
- Modulation of “QAM256”
- Channel “135”
- Click “Add Channel”
- Done!
Now you can restart Windows Media Center and tune into channel 135. Make sure you have your RF power output set correctly on the zvBox. You don’t want to over or under power the signal so make sure you calculate the correct cable/splitter loss.
Post any questions below or visit the AVSForum topic and follow the thread. Thanks to the Ceton support team on helping find the solution!
Note:
This is an unsupported feature (manually provisioning a channel using the AddChannel web page) and it will not work if a tuning adapter is connected – via Ceton support