Yesterday E4 on UK digital terrestrial changed from being a premium channel under TopUp TV to being a part of Freeview. Which is going to be fantastic once Big Brother is over J It did however cause a problem for Media Center. When Media Center does a digital channel scan it can tell what kind of service each channel is, some instantly get blocked when they are identified as unsupported services (i.e. Radio). Others don’t always line up correctly, so Media Center has a kind of ‘Block These’ list tucked away in the registry which will knock out BBCi, BBC Parliament, Bloomberg and E4. And this is where the issue is, although E4 is now free it is still on the hard coded blacklist.
To remove E4 from the list
1. Go to Start -> Run and type in regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\MediaCenter\Service\GLID
3. Double click on ‘ExclusionList’ in the right divide.
4. Delete the E4 line entirely but leave the other 3 channel names in place, these channels make use of technologies unsupported by Media Center.
5. Reboot the Media Center PC.
6. Start Media Center and go to Settings > TV > 'Scan for more services' to perform a channel scan.
If you do not want to edit the registry manually to do this you can use the attached e4.reg to make those changes.
e4.reg (.66 KB)
If this is done on a system which has not yet run 'Set Up TV Signal' or is running the release version of Media Center 2005 the above 6 steps should allow Media Center to see E4 when a scan is performed. Sometimes this may not be the case, particularly on systems which have had Media Center 2005 rollup 1 (KB873369) or later installed and where 'Set Up TV Signal' has already been run.
If ‘Scan for more services’ fails to detect E4
1. Go to Settings > TV > ‘Set Up TV Signal’. Use this wizard to configure your TV type and guide again. When a service scan is made during this wizard E4 should be detected if no restriction exists in the registry and you have a strong enough signal from your local transmitter.
2. If you have previously setup manual guide associations for channels you may need to make these again through Settings > TV > Guide > Add Listings to Channel. You should also verify that your upcoming recording schedule is correct after making these changes.
Updated: 13/06/2005