SpiceWare's Blog

Nice. I've been using a mini for a few years now with a USB tuner and EyeTV and its been very well behaved. Which mini did you pick up, btw? Mine is a C2D that was upgraded from a Core Solo - it couldn't do HD reliably without the extra core! Im assuming that running 4 streams would be totally out of the question

 

Enjoy the new setup

I picked the "middle" model and upgraded to the quad-core 2.6 GHz i7, the rest is stock (no fusion drive or extra RAM). I suspect that's a bit overkill as the CPU usage only ranges from 25-30% when I had all 4 streams going at the same time.

 

I debated getting the fusion drive, but decided not to as I'm most likely going to get a Drobo 5D with my tax refund.

 

I do have a couple questions that you might be able to help me with:

1) when I use the Apple Remote to control EyeTV, up/down also changes the system volume. That's quite annoying - any idea on how to fix it?

2) Does EyeTV have a daemon running for recording shows? In other words - if I quit EyeTV, will scheduled programs still get recorded?

I never use the Apple remote, so can't help you there. But as for #2, I'm pretty sure that as long as the user is logged in, it will record shows for you. We have it on a dedicated machine, so EyeTV is always running.

Is there an app for your iPhone you could use to control it?

The EyeTV app lets you watch shows on your iOS device. You can watch either recorded shows or live shows. The live shows use the Mac as an intermediary. It works better than the InstaTV app - my iPad 2 doesn't have quite enough horsepower to decompress HDTV, so InstaTV uses a "quick and dirty" method that works, but has issues (I've noticed the audio get out of sync, incorrect colors for a few seconds after scene changes, the picture gets quite blurry when the camera rapidly pans across the scene, and so on).

 

Looks like there's a 3rd party app, EyeTV Mote, that will control it so that may be an option. And of course there might be something in the EyeTV manual that says "when using the Apple Remote, do this..." but I haven't finished reading through it yet

I've found a solution for now - don't let the mini sleep. Apparently when OS X wakes up it grabs back the IR.

 

Using Candelair will supposedly take care of that problem.

Looks like there's a daemon - EyeTV Helper.

 

I did a test this morning, set a program to record at 8:30 then quit the program. It started up EyeTV to begin the recording. When it started, Eye TV was hidden (like when you hit COMMAND-H).

 

If I tried to use the EyeTV App on my iPad after quitting EyeTV, it would say that EyeTV wasn't running and give me the option to launch it on the mini. When I did, it would launch EyeTV but it didn't hide it like when the recording started.