Preparing the scan

If you have a DVB-S tuner and it appears in the list of TV tuner-cards below the TV Server in the left pane, you should see a screen similar to the one below when you select the card.
Make sure you have the cable from the LNB(s) connected and adjusted your satellite dish correctly before you start scanning.

In this section you can adjust most standard options for dvb-s scanning:
  Satellites

  Tip MediaPortal doesn't support Single Cable distribution (also known as Unicable or Sat CR). If your LNB also has standard/non-Unicable ("universal") outputs use them instead. There's also tuners with driver support for Single Cable.

In this section you can define up to four satellites configs that will be scanned. A satellite config consists of the used DisSEqC option (default: None), the Band to scan as well as the satellite. Always use the default options for DiSEqC and Band unless you know what you're doing and have a reason for changing these settings. The most important setting is Satellite as it defines which broadcasting satellite you want to scan (e.g Astra 19.2, Eurobird 1 29.2, Hot Bird 13.0,...) Create groups for This allows you to automatically create channel groups with this scan for each satellite, provider and Digital Satelite.
If you choose each satetellite MediaPortal will create one group for each scanned satellite (e.g. Astra, Eurobird, Hot Bird,...) and put all channels that are found for this satellite into this group.
If each provider is selected, a separate group will be created for each provider that is found in the scan. Provider is an entity that owns one or more channels. Be aware that for some satellite, there might be a very large number of different providers so choose this option carefully.
The last option "Digital satellite" will put all channels found for DVB-S scans in a group called "Digital Satellite".
The options can be combined. Enable channel movement detection It is intended if your provider(s) constantly move your channels to different frequencies. When you enable the option, TV Server uses the following logic:
0. Scan finds a channel.
1. Check: do we already know about a channel with this network ID + service ID combination?
- if YES, update the existing tuning details
- if NO, create a new channel

The default logic (when you don't enable the option) is only slightly different:
0. Scan finds a channel.
1. Check: do we already know about a channel with this network ID + transport stream ID + service ID combination?
- if YES, update the existing tuning details
- if NO, create a new channel

The option won't work for everyone because some providers have different channels with the same network ID + service ID combination. In those cases, the provider differentiates between the two channels using the transport stream ID. That is technically bad behaviour by the providers, but it caused so much trouble and is thus disabled by default MP 1.2.0. Enable DVB-S2 channels tuning/scanning This option MUST BE SELECTED if you want to use this card for HD channels. If this isn't selected, the channel scan will not find DVB-S2 channels, neither will the card be able to tune into DVB-S2 channels later on. Use advanced tuning options These settings allow tuning the settings for advanced users. The advanced settings are explained in more details in the Advanced Tuning Options page. Update satellite list Always do this before a channel scan!   Use the Update satellite list button to download a new configuration file from Team MediaPortal's servers.   Changes in satellite positions are now updated in the satellite.xml file.  This list contains up-to-date information on available transponder for the different satellites. If this isn't up-to-date you might not find all available channels if details of one or more transponder have changed. Scan for channels This will finally start the actual channel scan. MediaPortal TvServer will scan each transponder for the satellite and try to find all available channels on each transponder.

Scanning

After you have set all the options for the channel scan you can start by pressing Scan for channels.
As mentioned before, try to Update satellite list before you start the scan.

The scan will simultaneously search for TV and radio channels.

You will be presented with a screen similar to this.

You can see the following properties in the Scan progress box during scanning:
Signal level Indicates how strong the signal is that the TV card receives. Signal quality Indicates how good the signal is that your tv card receives from the satellite dish.
Remember that the display of the signal level and quality depends on the capabilites of your tuner-card and the driver.
The progress bars could be empty during scanning although signal level and quality are OK. Overall progress Indicates how far the overall scan has progressed already. Status Shows details of the Transponder that is currently scanned. As you see in the image below, for each scanned transponder MediaPortal lists the number of new channels found and the number of channels that already existed and were updated.

Once the scan is finished you will be presented with an overview of how many tv and radio channels were found during the scan, how many of them were new and how many were updated:

The Logical Channel Number (LCN) is only set when a channel is created during scanning. It will not be updated on subsequent scans. When no LCN is found on the network the value 10000 will be used.

Congratulations, you have finished a DVB-S scan and can now use these channels and organize them as described in the TV Channels and Radio Channels section.