Radio Channel Combinations

Combinations

This allows you to combine the same channel found on 2 or more different cards. For example, you may have the same channel broadcast on analog, DVB-T and DVB-S etc.
If the channel is selected for watching or used for recording, TV Server will use the highest priority TV card that is free and has that channel present.

Select the TV card using the drop down menu and a list of channels will be displayed on the left. If you click on one, any channels with a similar name will appear on the right, with the most likely match at the top.

If you have multiple cards of one and the same type (e.g. 2 DVB-S cards), channels found on both cards do not have to be combined because they are automatically treated as "virtually" combined and only appear once in every instance.
Consequently on the right side there are only channels from different card-typed are shown. So in the sample picture above the two "3sat"-channels on the right side are not duplicate DVB-S channels from a secondary DVB-S card but must be from different tuner card-types (here: from a DVB-T and from an Analog tuner-card).
As of MP Version 1.2.1. it is not possible to see from which tuner-cards the Similar channels on other cards originate. So in case of hard to identify multiple channel names it's better to rename the channels to an unambigous name in the TV Channels section like "3sat-analog".

So be very careful before you combine channels because at the moment the only way to dissolve a channel combination is by removing the unwanted channel from the channel edit menu (see also below). But this deletes the channel from the database and you have to rescan with your tuner-card to get the channel back to the channel list!

Now click on the Combine button to create the combination between the two channels.
You can select multiple channels (with CTRL-key pressed) on the right side for combining or better consecutively combine channels one by one if you have more than one match.

After a combination has been created it has to be selected again in the DVB-EPG even if both or all of the combined channels were selected before. The reason is that the new combination is treated like a newly added channel and thus is -as all new channels- not selected in the EPG by default.
So be careful not to forget this.

Remark: The right side is by default sorted in decreasing order of the correlation between the channel names (Ranking).
If  you don't see a 100% match at the top you should search the whole list of similar channels because the algorithm to calculate the ranking is not perfect. The ranking discriminates between upper and lower case letters, so be sure to carefully search the list for a match when the channel names only differ in their case ("ARTE" vs. "arte") or even only a single space ("WDR2" vs. "WDR 2") or a period ("NRW TV" vs. "NRW.TV") .
 

When you want to remove a channel from a formerly created combination you have to go to the TV-channels list and edit the channels:

Here you see a fourfold combination of a channel that is present on the DVB-S, DVB-T, DVB-C and on the analog tuner-card.
(Don't wonder a the seemingly unfitting "360 -GEO REPOR..." channel. Analog scanning often can't retrieve the correct channel name.)

By right-clicking one of the channels you get the option to remove it from this combination.
This deletes the channel also from the channel list and at the moment is the only way to remove a channel from a combination or dissolve a combination.
You should check the combination in all groups where you have stored one of the combined channels.