For Christmas I got an elgato EyeTV Hybrid, and I was excited. I was excited about recording shows (and movies) in HD. I was excited to get rid of the old low-definition DVD recorder. I was excited to have those crisp, clear, free HD networks that were on my TV finally on my computer. But when I plugged it in…? Nothing HD. Not sure why, some people blame it on Comcast messing with PSIP and virtual channels tables, but it just could be a not-sensitive-enough channel scanner. My TV was picking up some HD networks though, so I knew they were there, and I was determined to find them.

It took me a month to get all my HD channels to show up, but I finally did. If you want to know how, read on. If you just want the shortcut I found at the end…skip to the bottom.

1. Use the EyeTV Channel Scan. Didn’t work. Found some SD digital QAM channels, but not the HD ones I wanted.
2. Search SiliconDust’s Website for available channel listings. Found the channels I should have. Went to EyeTV, used their “manually add digital channel…” feature to try and add those channels (using the drop-down menu). Didn’t work.
3. Install Ubuntu and MythTV under Boot Camp. Hack in some 950q drivers, then use the MythTV channel scanner. Didn’t work.
4. Install dvb-utils and scan. Found some channels! Now we’re getting somewhere, but all I’ve got is a list of freqs in a channels.conf file that EyeTV won’t touch.
5. Consider ditching EyeTV and just using MythTV. Can’t get MythTV to work right in VirtualBox, and I’m not ready to give up OS X completely, so scratch that idea.
6. Manually enter the freqs from channels.conf file into EyeTV. Success! But some are still missing… come to the “oh, duh” realization.

The Trick

Hopefully, EyeTV found at least one QAM channel on its scan. You’re just going to mathematize from that.

1. Tune to an existent QAM channel, noting its “channel number” as indicated by EyeTV.
2. Right-click on your channel listing in EyeTV, and select “Manually add digital channel…”
3. Add (or subtract) 6,000.3 kHz to the frequency it shows to get the frequency for the next channel.
4. Hit “Add”
5. Rinse and repeat until you’ve tried every channel.
6. You should have them all: if you force the tuner to jump in the right increments, it will take more attention when trying these channels and should find the missing ones.
7. Hint: by checking the SiliconDust Website for your zip code, you can find the “Major” channels it’s supposed to be on, and multiply it out so you don’t have to try EVERY channel. For instance, if your channel 103 is on 667783 kHz, and you’re supposed to have a channel 115 multiplex, take 115-103 = 12 and multiply by 6,000.3 = 72,003.6. Add that to 667,783 and you enter that number (739786 kHz) to get your channel 115 stations.

Enjoy your new, complete QAM listings! Now, if you want, stream your EyeTV channels over your network with CyTV!