A digital television autoprogramming and tuning method and apparatus. In a digital television which can tune both MPEG 2 and PSIP format signals, a method of tuning uses one or more tables of information populated during an autoprogramming process. For MPEG 2 channels, the physical channel equals the major channel number and can be directly tuned. For PSIP channels, the major channel indexes a TSID which is used to determine a physical channel. If the TSID does not correspond to the correct program, the correct TSID is determined from the Program Specific Information in the data transport stream 134 and the system re-tunes to the correct physical channel. The autoprogramming process sequentially steps through each physical channel and populates the autoprogramming tables with information about each channel it finds, saving only a single TSID for a given major PSIP channel.