Thanks for the advice I am looking into looking into killing off some processes in Activity Monitor now to see if that works. Sometimes I get the free memory up to over 1 GB, but most times it is around 700-800; we’ll see

1. I haven’t come across any problems with battery life but I did turn the option off that automatically illuminated the remote when it sensed movement. Now it only lights up when I press a button so that’s gotta help with battery life.

2. If I understand your question correctly (and I’m not sure I do), you’re interested in EyeTV recordings being available on multiple TVs? I’m not sure how you could successfully do that without having Macs attached to each one with EyeTV installed (suing the Sharing feature). I suppose you might be able to do it with a jailbroken AppleTV (Plex can be installed then and can play back EyeTV recordings) but I’m just not sure because I haven’t tried it myself. I watch TV on one TV that’s hooked up to a Mini or on my iMac, Macbook Air, or iPad. Sorry I can’t offer more counsel but it sounds like you already found a potential solution from WD.

3. I have no idea why you’d be getting stuttering but it does sound like your system must be red-lining when you’re running EyeTV – that would be evidenced by the live TV stuttering when you begin recording. I’m in the same boat to an extent because my Mini’s a few years old too and I try to mitigate anything like this by *only* running EyeTV and Remote Buddy. This allows both the CPU and RAM to focus exclusively on the task at hand. Are you killing all processes via Activity Monitor and still seeing these issues? That’d be the best (and, frankly, only) course of action I could recommend. I’m lucky enough not to have had that issue much since I began militantly controlling how many apps are open when EyeTV’s at work.

Hope that helps at least a bit – good luck!

First, I took your advice and purchased the remote — well ahead of my plans to convert my Mac to an HTPC, so even if I had a problem with it now, I can’t return it . I used it for the first time yesterday and have to say that I like it very much; cosmetically, it works since it looks like a TV remote and thus fits in the whole scope of things better than using an Apple remote. I do worry about the drain on the battery and was wondering if you have come across any problems in that area.

Next, a suggestion for a future topic. Have you looked into options one can try to get more than one TV hooked up to receive EyeTV recordings (not programming, although that would not seem hard to do either)? One thing I am trying out on my second is the new WD Live Streaming Player. It is pretty nice, if a bit laggy, but the greatest thing is that it does play EyeTV recordings. I think a good post might for you for the future might be to look into this device or perhaps other options to make your whole house easily accessible to recordings — a sort of whole home DVR set-up (without the pausing live TV capabilities, that is).

Third, and truly most critical that I get your input on. As I kind of alluded to above, I spent yesterday doing a full roll-out of my Mac as HTPC set-up, pretty much according to your guidelines, but I am running into problems and hope you can help. To set the scene — I am using a 2007 white Macbook, 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM. I have the newest version of HDHomerun with EyeTV and have an internal antenna hooked up to it. This is my second attempt at getting everything to work but I can’t seem to iron out all the kinks. Initial test runs came out very well, but I now notice that, when I set a program to record — whether via programming ahead of time or on-the-spot recording — the show stutters, pixelates somewhat and freezes, thus making it impossible to record. EyeTV works perfectly when everything is Live, but as soon as I push record, it all goes downhill. I also notice that, when the first tuner is recording, the second tuner stutters on HD channels (or so it seems; I couldn’t detect such stuttering on SD channels). This is the same problem I had on my first attempt last year, which led me to abandon the project and regroup. I thought the problems were initially related to setting everything up wirelessly problem but I solved that (or so I thought) by using powerline adapters (200 Mbps ones) to connect everything now.

What am I doing wrong? Do you think it is a hardware issue? Or maybe a powerline issue (should I use 500Mbps rather than the 200?)? I know EyeTV’s potential and everyone seems to love how it works, but this new, yet old, setback is getting me really frustrated.

Any help would be extremely appreciated, if you can. Sorry both for the length of this post and, especially, if I am being a burden by asking for advice; I just respect your opinion and expertise on this subject and thought I would ask.

Thanks

I think you’ll like the remote. And, if not, Amazon’s return policy is excellent.

Glad to see you posting here again; please do so more often. You are my inspiration for cutting the cord.

Other than that, I like this remote idea; and its cheap too to boot! I think I will get it based solely on your recommendation.

http://www.sustworks.com/pa_guide/index.html

Enjoy!

- Peter Sichel
Founder & Chief Engineer
Sustainable Softworks

If I add the EyeTV archive as a video plug-in, as you have done, then I get all the shows BUT ungrouped with ugly names etc.

Oh well.

Any ideas?

(BTW — weirdly, there’s no date on your post above, so I don’t know if it’s been there for days or years. Hope you’re still monitoring this forum).

Thanks…