erikmh

Note that, as of EyeTV 3.6.9 (7521), Silicon Dust HDHomeRun devices are no longer supported.

For eleven years now I've been recommending EyeTV to anyone and everyone who will listen. I've lost track of the number of purchases that were due to my recommendation. And my name is now mud, because Geniatech has decided with no warning to completely pull out of the North American market. Well, now I know what to do the next time a Chinese company purchases a product I use!

For eleven years now I've been recommending EyeTV to anyone and everyone who will listen. I've lost track of the number of purchases that were due to my recommendation. And my name is now mud, because Geniatech has decided with no warning to completely pull out of the North American market. Well, now I know what to do the next time a Chinese company purchases a product I use!

This can work, as @zarmanto remembers from Old-Who days. There is typically a huge hit in signal strength, though — and not the kind you can make up for via amplification. This means it will only work well when your stations from both directions come in fairly strongly. In my location this approach is a complete non-starter. I’ve been doing this for several years now, with pretty good success. On our barn, one directional antenna facing due west, cabled to three receivers; one directional antenna facing due east, cabled to two receivers. All receivers connected via ethernet to a router in the barn, with ethernet running to the house. The big problem, as @bluesincenew has found, is that there’s no way to tell EyeTV which receiver you want to use to receive a given channel. That one feature would solve the whole problem. The workaround is to use two different Macs to do your recording. (I have a 2009 Mac mini and a 2009 MacBook Pro which I keep running for this and a few other, lighter-duty functions.) Make a note of each of your receiver’s 8-character device ID numbers (of the form 103af8bc) and notate which antenna is plugged in to each. Then, on each Mac, run EyeTVSetup Assistant from the EyeTV menu. Choose “Network” and your receiver manufacturer. After you get through the (re-)registration and setup screens, choose the the device(s) connected to the antenna whose stations you want to record with that Mac, and set the input to “Antenna.” Make sure the other devices are set to “Not Used.” Obviously, you’d the devices up the exact opposite way on the other Mac. There is a bug to beware of: the ordering of the devices in the pop-up menu is random and changes when you adjust your settings. Keep your wits about you, though, and you’ll be fine. All this presumes that you have an extra Mac ready to hand, of course. If you want your recordings to automatically be moved to a server drive somewhere, I’d recommend Hazel by Noodlesoft. I’ve been thinking it would be a good idea to “simplify” my setup and try to get everything working on one Mac, so I was looking into this. I’d been hoping that I could use separate user accounts on one Mac, for example, instead of two separate Macs. No dice: the relevant preference file is kept in `/Library/Users/Shared/Preferences/` (at least in macOS 10.11 El Capitan), so changes made to devices affect both user accounts. The set-up is pretty convoluted, and looks like it may involve more than one XML .plist file. Possibly relevant files are stored in various different directories. Several of EyeTV’s .plist files are completely overwritten by EyeTV whenever changes are made within the app and/or when the app is closed. And some of the .plist files are exact copies of the same data stored in different places, where a change to one without the identical change in the other can cause EyeTV to complain of corrupted data. And aliases and symlinks won’t help — they’re great for pointing to one thing from multiple places, but not for tricking an app into looking in different places for something depending on certain criteria. I’m very happy to hear that this was documented at one point. I’m going to try searching. I suppose the wayback machine didn’t capture it?

That is not good, @lzachs! Clearly, Geniatech is having some growing pains. I’m more than happy to cut a company a little slack when they’re in the position of supporting lots of new users — and doing it with a large data import and conversion. (I used to work in I.T.) But in Geniatech’s case their heart just doesn’t seem to be in it. It seems like they only occasionally check in here — and tickets go ignored for days or weeks at a time. That’s not right: we are paying customers, and I hope this gets resolved for you soon. @NinjaKai, can you help lzachs out? On a different note, I am happy to hear you are from Sweden! We have a high-school exchange student from Sweden coming to stay with us (in the United States) this coming school year, and are looking forward to learning more about your language and culture! I hope Geniatech gets Gracenote up and running for you soon, — Erik

Thank you, NinjaKai (Kaihao?)! Klaus, I’ve confirmed that my copy of EyeTV now reports a correct subscription expiration date, and I again have the usual 12 or 13 days of listings. I hope your situation was resolved, too. I’ll happily give Geniatech 5 out of 5 for “making things right,” 5 out of 5 for attitude and courtesy, and (not so happily) 2 out of 5 for promptness. Television is scarcely a critical activity, but those of us who rely on Smart Guides (I have nearly 800) are dead in the water without up-to-date EPG information, so promptness is important. Nonetheless, all was resolved satisfactorily. Thank you again, NinjaKai! — Erik

I’m sorry to hear this, Klaus. Hopefully, though, they’ll now see this as a Geniatech problem, rather than a customer who just doesn’t understand how to renew properly. Geniatech, I’m enclosing a copy of my Elgato EyeTV EPG order confirmation and renewal key from February (2016-02-26). Paired with my ticket number “2016070916000126” you should have all the information you need to make this right. Thanks, — Erik

I should have said: my ticket number is “2016070916000126”.

Hello! I followed these instructions in early June, and all worked well. My TV Guide account was properly renewed through next February (2017). However, about ten days ago EyeTV began telling me that my account had expired — and my listings go only through 2016-07-19. I have tried again to perform the EPG extension (per the “How to extend your EPG subscription successfully” FAQ), however I am of course told that my account already exists (since I did this step back in early June). I contacted Customer Support via that web page five days ago, and have received no answer other than an automated response. Please help! — Erik