But the fact Echostar introduced a fix weeks ago specifically for the Olympics means at least one box manufacturer was making sure they worked- perhaps the others simply didn't.

Having read the helpful comments of others, the consensus of opinion seemed to be that for those boxes that did have all the Olympic Channels, a return to Factory Condition would solve the problem. I have now done this with my Panasonic PVR & indeed, all the Freesat Olympic Channels are now working.

A pity Freesat did not know of this problem & put it on their 999 page.

I will list this under a new thread so that it shows up for anyone else encountering this problem.

Just done some diagnosis on my panny Freeway TV.

I tried to tune in manually via the other sat options using the kingofsat data. Surprisingly even under other sat some of the channels are showing no signal.

It turns out that all of the missing channels were from the same frequency - namely 12441 V on astra 2b.

Any suggestions as to what I might be able to do to resolve this?

Matt

Why should the public be relied on to test these things?

The channels have been broadcasting for over a month now (closer to two for 4 of the HD and some of the SD), surely the manufacturers should have tested their products on the channels and realised something was wrong a month ago? They're bound to have a way to add the channels to the EPG on their test rigs and the BBC had been showing the torch relay on Olym 13 and 14 for a few weeks prior to the opening (and the "upcoming" loop from the outset).

The only party to blame here is the box manufacturers for being lazy.

Why should the manufacturers have tested it? What about the BBC? The whole of the BBC's job is to get these channels working. The manufacturers are busy with other things.

DECT phone base or WiFi point close by? Try turning them off or moving them away from the receiver and try again.

No to both of those. Curious that it is just one "frequency" that seems to be affected (and that every other one is on a strong signal).

I suppose my fallback will be to tune into the SD channels for those ones which are "missing" in HD. It could be that my dish is marginal just for those frequencies, so perhaps a little shove would do the job, but I don't want to mess around with that as the dish is now nicely rusted into place after being in situ when we bought the house nearly 8 years ago.

Matt

Up early this morning, and thought I'd catch up on some Olympic events.

None of the Olympic channels had repeats any events, and were just showing timetables of events to come.

Why not use this 'downtime' to show repeats of events that have already taken place ?

Other Panasonic owners were complaining of the same problem on another thread (see posts 182 onwards). Seems a Factory Reset is the answer (unfortunately). Don't know if you have tried first deleting these channels and then retuning them - wouldn't be as dramatic as a full Factory Reset so maybe worth a try.

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showt...1671605&page=8

Yes, I thought that was the idea of these channels, obviously not! Seems to me that the Beeb are struggling to use all the channels fully.

I think the BBC is severely restricted by the IOC in what they are allowed to broadcast. For instance on the radio they are not allowed to included any Olympic commentary in their podcasts although they can repeat extracts of commentary live on the radio (according to Paddy O'Connell [Broadcasting House])! So they probably don't have repeat rights. The daily 1 hour 3D highlight programme on BBC HD (made up entirely of repeats) is an 'Olympic Broadcasting Services' production - this programme is not produced by the BBC itself. But I agree it does seem an awful waste of transmission facilities.

Yes, I saw that, but the buggeration factor of having to re-do my labels, tweak my personalised settings for brightness / contrast / sound etc makes me less keen to do that.

I didn't know if anyone had boiled it down to being the same issue though - i.e. only related to that particular frequency. If it is something to do with the SID or similar being "stuck" from a previous channel, I'm surprised that this affects both Freesat and "other sat" mode. I might have a quick play tonight to see what customisation I have done to the TV, and then confirm if its worth while factory re-setting. Given that one of the streams appears to show beach volleyball almost exclusively, I suppose it depends how important HD is for my viewing pleasure of that event

Matt

I know what you mean - I have 28.2º, 23.5º & 19.5º on my non-Freesat with hundreds of channels all neatly sorted - perish the thought of doing a factory reset on my Humax boxes and losing them all.

Thanks for the tip. Worked for me too.

Just to add to this, my Panny BS750 PVR/BD recorder acquired all the BBC Oly channels OK - but the main TV guide has only 12 characters available to it so I see channel names such as:

161 BBC Oly1
162 BBC Oly1
163 BBC Oly1

instead of 161 BBC Oly 11 HD, 162 BBC Oly 12 HD etc., which is ridiculous so I have to scroll down one at a time to see which is which. Poor Panasonic EPG design, probably.

On the other hand, I have checked the resolution and bitrates with DVB Viewer on my PC, and have seen peak bitrates as high as 19.4Mbps today so far, all at 1920 x 1080 so picture quality is superb.

I did however have to manually input into DVBViewer 8 of the HD channels on 2 transponders, as it couldn't see them when I scanned.

Is subtracting 150 from the channel number so hard? In any case you are better of accessing via the Red Button.

That's one of the most pointless comments I've seen today - I was just adding to the available information. Go away. Shoo!

You suggested you were struggling and needed help.

I was (rightly I think) criticising Panasonic's EPG design for this model, and praising some other aspects (it picked them all up automatically, OK). I didn't need advice on how to do sums or I would have asked for it. Your method doesn't work properly anyway.

Red Button is too slow, don't use that, I have my own workarounds.

Why do you think it doesn't work?

No, the idea is that the channels are basically just the "raw" live feeds from the events. These are the streams that they pass on to the various national broadcasters around the world, to add their own commentary to and cut away from for studio time/replays/etc. It's just that, this time round, they figured they'd give them all to us directly.

I can't believe that we're being given 24 free HD channels of Olympic sport and people are still bloody complaining!!

FWIW, regards reception problems some are having, I've got two PCs with DVB-S2 cards in them and all 24 HD channels are working fine in Media Center on both.

I had the same trouble when Granada went to a new freq on my Panasonic tv, and had to retune & dump hundreds of junk channels. I am not bothering with a retune for the Olympics,to much hassle

I wonder why S2 fools the Panasonics & others

Has anyone with problems on TVs and non PVR stbs with the channels not appearing on the EPG tried accessing the streams via the red button option. It certainly works on Sky boxes even without the channels being present on the EPG where I have access to all the streams active that day and if I access via a BBC HD channel it goes to the HD stream. The only thing I am missing is the future 6 days EPG. If it works for you then it will save all the faff of adding channels etc.

Often public testing shows up problems that private testing doesn't. There's no substitute for real life transmissions over distance plus huge numbers of testers. That's why so many companies (not talking sat box companies here but general software companies) beta test.

Showing some programmes on these channels and having them advertised so as to draw in viewers would soon have triggered negative feedback showing any issues the engineers hadn't picked up on.

My HDR has been fine with all the Olympic channels but my Panasonic TV only picked up about half the 24 but the factory reset trick worked here and all the Olympic channels are now fine on the Pani too.