Something that’s not quite perfect in MythTV is sorting channels. You can move channels around one by one in the backend setup screens but this is slow and boring. A quicker way is to update the channel table in the mythconverg database on your backed. I had a search around and found this useful post on the Ubuntu forms but it was still a pain to have to adjust the SQL strings as they were. My solution is to put the SQL into to a spreadsheet (attached below):
Channel Order Helper Spreadsheet
Obviously your channel listing is going do be different to mine so I suggest you do the following:
- Download the spreadsheet
- Get your existing channel names by running:
SELECT DISTINCT name FROM channel ORDER BY LPAD(channum, 3, 0) ASC;
- Paste them into column D in the spread sheet
- Re-arrange as required
- Select all the cells and copy into gedit or similar (removing any tabs)
- Run all statements agains your mythconverg database.
NB. This will update the channel numbers for all sources (you could always change the sql to include a “WHERE sourceid = 1″ clause or simialr. Also, make sure that your frontend is set to sort by “Channel Number” in “Utilities/Setup” -> “Setup” -> “TV” -> “Settings” -> “General”