Comcast does not use the features bulit into and accepted by the industry to make it easier for the consumers who do not have a cable box to know what industry accepted channel number I.E. 74-3 matches what channel in their guide (available only if you have a cable box).
This feature is called mapping. ATSC channels currently do this. For instance if the consumer locally is receiving analog channel 3 they will receive digital channel 3 on the FCC channel 54 but their TV will report this as 3-1 and the TV will report the analog channel as 3-0. It's a simple matter to put a channel # in the digital stream that will be reported by our tuners, in fact any equipment with a QAM tuner (cable) or ATSC tuner (over the air) will properly do this.
Schedules direct publishes the channel numbers that comcast assigns and can be found in the comcast guide. For the analog channels this works for us but for the digital channels it does not. Our tuners for linuxmce report the correct RF channel and the comcast assigned subchannel number in the digital stream. In the comcast guide a 74-3 that our tuner has reported is a channel 690 in the comcast guide.
I see no easy way for schedules direct to fix this. It would require a person to actually look at the channels and create a lookup table. Comcast has changed their digital lineup at least every three months as they move around and add more digital channels. They are in the process of creating new digital channels as they convert the analog lineup to digital.
It is not in their economic interest to make it easy for us to receive digital channels. The cable industry is trying to get the FCC to allow them to scramble all digital channels. So I don't think trying to get a cable company to do the right thing is the way to go in the short term.
Long term, congress is going to subsidise set top boxes so logically they should have a say in this issue.
