I have written before about getting Windows Media Center working in New Zealand using DVB-T and DVB-S. This covers accessing Freeview TV using an ariel and a dish so I thought that I had covered everything. It turns out not.

I have just moved house, still renting and part of the deal is that I just inherit a satalite dish, I know the previous tenant had working TV, but nothing else.

I have an AverMedia 3D USB Satellite receiver. Luckily its software is pretty good and it could do a “blind scan” on the dish and could find all the Freeview TV stations. Windows Media Center alas could not automatically find any stations. Well it was never actually sold or supported in NZ so its not completely surprising.

In the past I had a dish with a single oscillator, however as the great article points out the only way to really know what type your dish is, is to climb on the roof and look at it. I really didnt want to do this. However it did give me some numbers to try and by luck (and trying all the available options on the LNB setup screen) I managed to get some kind of signal out of the dish.

The settings I used were for a custom dual oscillator.

Low LOF: 9,7550
High LOF: 10,600
Switch: 11,700
POL: Dual

This got me further with Windows Media Center however it could still only automatically detect the test signal for the Opus D1 satellite. However Media Center does have an option to enter the transponder information manually and I could get the information from the AverMedia software. It turns out that the Freeview channels are all on three transponders so its not too much of an effort to type them in.

The manual transponder information is

Frequency Symbol Rate Polarity
11,455 22,498 H
11,482 22,500 H
11,518 22,500 H

Next was getting the EPG, I use EPG Collector, which is brilliant. For some reason I could not use the same settings in its setup I eventually ended up with the following setup.

[GENERAL]
Timeouts=10,300,5,1,50
Option=DuplicateSameChannels,WmcImport,AutoMapEpg,WmcStarSpecial

[DVBS]
Satellite=1600
Dish=10750000,10750000,0,,Legacy
TuningFile=160.0°E Optus D1.xml
ScanningFrequency=12519000,22500,3/4,H,OpenTV
Location=NZL,0

The final piece of the puzzle was to disable the channels that media center insisted on putting into the guide. I am not sure why but I could not stop it from putting the channels in but I could disable them in the Guide settings. The channels where the first group before the ones I had manually detected using the transponder information above.

However when I did this I found that the listings for TVNZ1 were going to the channel on channel 1 rather than the one on channel 73 which actually worked. The way to fix this was to go into Media Center and adjust the settings for all the channels that are not working, Select Edit Channel, Edit Listings and ensure that you select the listing for the correct channel that ends epg-collector. Make sure you copy rather than delete and you are good to go.