Given all the advance notice (and even a four-month delay) you’d think that Microsoft would have been fully prepared for the transition to all-digital broadcasts in the U.S.
Wrong. I’m not the only Media Center user who suddenly lost several over-the-air HD channels last Friday. I’ve got details over at ZDNet. If you’re a Media Center user and you’ve been affected, please leave a comment there:
Ed Bott 
Last week (before the dtv transition) the pinnacle usb TV ATSC tuner that i borrowed from my sister was working without a issue recording channel 7 abc using Windows 7. Yesterday I made several attempts to fix the signal loss in channel 7 abc in LA before the Lakers game was televised, using 4 different attenna that i got from my DTV converter box and got nothing one red signal bar. I could not record the Lakers game 5 yesterday.
(A bit off-topic, but related.) I have two analog TVs with newly-acquired over-the-air DTV converters. I had them set up months ago.
After the analog cut-off, I noticed several preset channels were tuning different stations than expected. For example. my ABC affiliate was tuning in a Spanish-language channel. I don’t know if it was a side-effect of the missing analog signals, but I had to rescan/setup again to get everything working as expected. It took me a while to figure out what was going on.
I had chalked it up to a random failure but later that night I found my upstairs TV was doing the same thing. The same fix worked. Weird.
Knowing that one of my atsc local affiliates was changing its frequency on Friday, I wronly assumed that it would be an easy change (xp mce). Wrong!
Finding no way to delete the primary channel, after a bit of research I deleted it’s entry from the xml files and restarted mc expecting that running a re-setup in the TV setting would discover the channel in its new location. Wrong again! It actually “found” it again at the OLD frequency but showing no signal there.
Instead, as it turns out, I had to delete the channel in the xml, restart mce, then do a manual addition of the digital channel in the TV settings. After that, all was well.
Anyone have any idea why the scan for channels in setup would find the original frequency even though there as no signal there and the entries had been remove from the xml files?
I am in Australia, and we are going thru a Digital switchover of our own. Up until a couple of weeks ago I could use my HP laptop to watch tv thru media centre no problems. However now every time I select live tv in media centre my laptop blue screens.
This coincided with the launch of the digital tv service called freeview here in Australia.