It crossed my mind that I'd like to replace BBC1 SD, and ITV SD with their HD counterparts.. is this something anyone else had done with no odd side effects (like messing up scheduled recordings)?
Not something I have tried. At the moment BBC One HD / BBC HD is not regionalised so I cannot watch my local programs I.E. NorthWest Tonight etal. when tuned into a HD channel. All I get is some muzac and a ident telling me to switch to BBC One (SD). So for me that's a deal breaker.
I'm pretty sure you can't do it. The stations are allocated to station numbers by a property in the broadcast called the LCN (which I assume means Logical Channel Number). When you tune the box either automatically or manually, when the channel data stream gets scanned for stations within, the LCNs are picked up and that's where the stations get stored whether you like it or not. BBC1 is on LCN 1, BBC1 HD is on LCN 50. If you pick up signals from two regions so there are two different channels on the same LCN (BBC1 West and BBC1 Wales for example), you get asked which region you want and the other one gets bumped into the 800's on a first come first served basis. Your only other option is to allocate Favourites.
I used to do this on my Samsung TV and it worked well. On my humax box I have created a favorites list TV_BEST and added the channels to it such that 50 appears first on the list, then 2 then 51, 52, 5, 53 etc. it achieves a similar effect. I use channel 1 or 3 to see the local news and they are in the position that 50 & 51 would have been.
I've been thinking about this, and I can't see any reason why you couldn't change the LCN of any channel using the custom firmware. All of the internal databases use a 'service ID' to reference the channels, not the LCN. That makes sense because otherwise things would break when duplicate channels were moved to the 800 range. As far as I can tell the LCN is only used to order the channels and select the right one when you type a number in. All that would be necessary is to modify the channel database and reboot. I'll give it a go over the weekend and see how it interacts with recordings etc. It would probably cause interaction issues with the remote scheduling portal however as LCN is one of the key identifiers used between it and the Humax devices.
