Getting HD over Cable with Vista Media Center

Getting your HD over the air is great. You don't have to pay anything to get a perfect picture on your HDTV. Depending on where you live, however, can mean you get poor reception. Weather can effect this signal. My neighbor has a problem with planes flying overhead on there way to landing at the airport! I bought the HDHomerun so that I could tune the unencrypted local HD channels that most providers do not scramble called clear QAM. I had basic cable already but did not want to pay extra for digital cable, and extra for other HD channels.
I now wanted to use Vista Media Center to record the channels. Vista is setup only to work with over-the-air HD so there is a little work to be done mapping the QAM channels to the ATSC channels so you can watch these new channels and get program guide data. Someone has made this an easier task by making a remaping GUI. You can download this here. You can unzip this into the C:\Program Files\Silicon Dust\HDHomerun directory. You then right-click on the QAMmapper.exe and pick run as administrator.


You pick the options of MCE and Full scan and you should see what HD channels you can pick up. I got the five major networks and checked them. Then you can assign virtual channels and physical channels. In order to get the guide to work you have to choose these two channels to be the same as the ATSC channels that Media Center has for you area. You can open an XML filed called ATSCChannels.xml in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\EPG\prefs and find these virtual and physical channels if you have already scanned for HD channels in your area. Then you save the remap file and go to Documents\QAM Mapper and copy the atscprefs.xml that you just made to the prefs directory above.
Now you can manually setup your channels and scan for digital channels and should find the new QAM channels as if they were ATSC channels. This will then assign guide data to the channels and you should be able to watch and record them.