Cluttered

My Current EyeTV4 Issues

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PROBLEMS:

  • Date shown at the top but no DAY
  • Display forever jumping back up when you try to scroll to see what is on
  • If you try to click on 3 sequential programmes and schedule them, after each one the display jumps wildly to some other vertical position making the process unbelievably difficult and tedious.
  • Always opens the main window with a large gap at the top and ignores previous size/position
  • Favourite channels after app quit/open is always shown in list mode
  • Frequent crashes
  • Recordings list doesn't update until you exit & re-enter it
  • Go to now pre 6am shows yesterday and you can't scroll to today
  • Often opens up a window or two on startup without being asked
  • Often the first window it automatically opens is huge not normal size.
  • Under the Window menu there is often 1 or 2 tv windows that I had no idea were open, no sound until I select them to close
  • No longer exports, managed one but since then nothing, might be v3 recordings that fail
  • Change channel by pressing a number in full screen mode and it changes, the info box does not go away, the app is (not responding) for ever until it’s force quit.
  • If you have rules then they are always visible at the top you can’t pop them down or hide them.
  • Can sort some windows but not guides, v3 just click a title
  • Can't sort epg's by anything other than date
  • Frequently lose the top of a guide so have to max/min to reset
  • No indication on top time bar of when recordings are scheduled so can’t quickly tell if you have things set 
  • Recordings & Schedules view are nowhere near as clean and easy to read as v3
  • Doesn't remember recent searches
  • Some recordings, when playing back if you press the right arrow to jump 30s instead it goes straight to the end
  • Numerous support contacts, all ignored  

 

Workarounds:

  • missing counts of items in each list - tap sizes and it displays
  • schedules don't list description despite huge unused space - does in M & L just not smallest
  • Often Live TV stops every second, impossible to watch - unplug aerials & usb then re-plug in

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Two more:

1) It uses 20-25% CPU when it isn't doing anything (or rather shouldn't be doing anything, no idea what it is actually doing though it seems to have a lot of open files).

2) It seems to be impossible to turn sharing off. Turn it off, go to another tab, go back, hey presto it turned itself back on. iPhone access is off, no reason that it should be enabled at all.

What  class bit of software this junk is. 

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I managed to get sharing to stay off, but to do so required me to delete the EyeTV Connect folder and app. Genius. Other software providers just honour the preferences and turn the feature off, no such boring stuff from geniatech, nope, they completely ignore the settings and force you to manually remove software.

I found that if the main EyeTV4 app is in the “recordings” view then even though it should be doing nothing at all then the cpu usage averages at 25% constantly. If instead you switch it to the “programme guide” view then it drops to around 3%. Not sure what percentage is used by each of the other views, something to test when I can be bothered. Unbelievable.

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I have tried it on Mojave, Catalina and Big Sur. My iMac is currently on Catalina. I have tried it on an iMac, a Mac Mini, and in vmware and parallels. Upgrades and clean installs.

v3 was great v4 is awful. I submitted numerous support requests on the website over the last 6 or more months, still no responses other than one when my serial number was disabled as I uninstalled it and used it in a vm, apparently uninstalling isn't acceptable you have to use the eyetv reporter software that they don't ship with it unlike virtually any other application!! Why am I not surprised.

Exporting isn't related to old v3 recordings as I at one point suspected, new v4 ones don't work either. I managed to export once but that was it.

Elgato were excellent, geniatech are not, look how long it took them to produce a 64 bit app. You might think that they took their time to ensure it was a wonderful bug free app, you'd be wrong.

On a positive note, only the recordings view seems to use excessive cpu when the app is doing nothing (or rather *supposed* to be doing nothing), the other views seem to behave.

Just for completeness, I am using an EyeTV Diversity in dual tuner mode, I have three of them.

Edited by Cluttered
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Wow, I am impressed with how thoroughly you've tested this. And three EyeTV Diversity's?? 😁

I'm now having a new issue all of a sudden: it won't record anything that I've scheduled.

And I 100% agree with you on EyeTV 3 vs 4, and on Elgato vs Geniatech.

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Tried it in a Monterey vm yesterday too just to complete the set (it doesn't run in High Sierra), and all the same problems. I really don't know what to try next. 

Exporting from any of them now creates the file, but it's zero KB and doesn't look like it's doing anything, no export indication, I have left it for an hour and nothing changes (just in case). It really is junk.

A lot of the problems I can live with (well I don't have much choice!), I'd like to be able to export even one at a time (v3 could select a number and it worked through them, v4 one at a time and none of them work!). I'd also like the top red indicator back that shows where/when recordings are scheduled.

The three diversity's I must stress were for EyeTV3 from some time back, I wouldn't recommend anyone to buy EyeTV since geniatech took over. The problem is the lack of competition which means they can be as useless as they like and just rake the money in.

Don't think I had the schedule issue. Actually that's not true, I just remembered, when I upgraded from v3 to v4 it didn't record anything. The reason was that it said it had upgraded it all, it all looked fine but actually all the channels were bad. I had to update the channels then go through each schedule and either reassign it or delete it and recreate it. 

Very irritating.

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Oh and, it didn't record once or twice and I had to quit it, unplug the usb, plug the usb back in and then re-open the app. For some reason it 'forgot' it had a diversity plugged in - I mean it still showed in the sidebar, you could still select it, but if you opened a new window it wouldn't display a channel and all schedules broke as it thought it didn't have the adaptor...

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Plus a couple of times I have had it record a different channel to the one it was set to record, forgot to list that one, and this last week a number of the recordings have skips in them, in other words you watch it back and it suddenly jumps a second or two ahead, the missing second(s) aren't there it obviously skipped them when it recorded them. BBC2 & Channel 4 seem particularly bad. Rescanned the channels but it doesn't help. 

It means you schedule stuff to record and then it's a coin toss as to whether it will be watchable or not.

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I did have a couple of oddities in the console related to wakein, saying it couldn't find the file, I think that's a Catalina bug as it happens for ChronoSync too.

Anyway, I quit EyeTV4, removed "/Library/Application Support/EyeTV/" - EyeTV Helper & Wakein (just those two files). Then re-opened the app and it recreated them. That might help?

I noticed on one of my attempts that the EyeTV Helper was still the v3 version and hadn't been updated. Anyway, if you can't get it working then that may be worth trying.

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If you have more than a screen full of rules (38 for me) then it is impossible to get to the last ones in edit mode (as soon as you alter/add/delete then it jumps to a full screen of rules ‘edit mode’) - to get to rules 39+, save, move to a different guide, go back, scroll the top rules to the one you need, edit it, then repeat the whole process starting with ‘save’ for any other changes.

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Found another one. If you edit (add/delete, not alter - won’t let me edit the last post to change that), then it resizes the EyeTV window and goes under the dock making the last few items difficult to see, and the last two lines impossible to see as it won’t scroll to them, you have to resize the window before you can access them.

 

3E5FCF3D-5B77-41D5-B26C-BC114DBBC384.jpeg

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When I open a new window it’s a toss up if there will be any sound. If there isn’t then I need to keep opening/closing until it eventually gives in and turns sound on.
It isn’t the volume level, it isn’t muted, it’s just broken. 

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Record two programs one after the other (EyeTV diversity so dual tuners).

Open the first from recordings to watch while it is recording. When the next one starts to record, rather than doing it in the background it jumps into the window you were watching.  It does record it into a second file as it should using the other tuner but it shouldn’t override the one you are/were watching.

You have to close that window, go back to recordings, re-open the original recording to continue.

v3 would just play the one you selected originally to the end, rather like you would want it to!!

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Clarifying one of the problems:

Go to now pre 6am shows yesterday and you can't scroll to today

a better(?) description is:

Scroll the guide and it stops on mine with 8am at the far right, to see 8am onward you need to move to tomorrow in the top bar then scroll all the way back to the left! You can’t scroll or use the pop down.

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Hi Cluttered

You are lucky if you managed to downgrade from 8528 to 8526. In my case before «upgrading» to 8528, I had a working 8526 on my Mac Pro 2019 and a 8524 on my Mac mini M1 2020. Why not the 8526 on the Mac mini, too? Well, I need to stream the program from the Mac mini to my iPhone via the internet (remote access with the EyeTV app). And the 8526 does not stream the audio, so I had to go back to 8524.

However, I tried to upgrade both of them to 8528 as Geniatech communiacted that the audio streaming problem is solved on this release. Result: the 8528 cannot be installed on M1 macs and on my Mac Pro 2019 (Intel) the app is crashing after the programm search. But the worst: After trying to downgrade on both Macs, even the previous working versions 8524/8526 are crashing now. Of course, I used the EyeTV reporter for deinstalling the 8528 but most probably a critical file was left in the system. And this remaining code is now crashing the older versions too.

I'm in contact with Geniatech's developer team, hoping that a quick solution is on the way. Had to send them screen shots. Facing your list of of bugs above and my own experience, I'm not sure whether they are fully aware of the situation. IMO a lack of resources or a lack of experience in regards to the Apple world. Or both. It is extremely hard to understand, that they were unable to bring the full feature set and performance of the good working EyeTV 3 (32 bit) to EyeTV 4 (64 bit). Apple published so much instructions and tools for this transition well before the switch. And now the same again with the transition to the M1 processor architecture (Apple Silicon)?

Regards, Roland

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I forgot to mention this in the above post: After installing 8528 ended in a continuous crash of 8528 AND the 8524/8526, I strongly recommended Geniatech to remove the 8528, as this version has the potential to make all even worse. However, as far as I see, it is still available...

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Hi Roland,

I haven't tried to downgrade, though I have all the old versions and time machine nd numerous backups an I have done it many times in the past. EyeTV4 is absolute rubbish.

The great long (and growing) list was all for 8524 on numerous versions of macOS on a mac mini and iMac. 8528 solves nothing on that list. Haven't noticed anything new yet but I only did it yesterday.

I have raised support requests for months and got bog all response from them, I raised a new one yesterday with my current list (I'll post the latest one next just as a summary), I have yet to have any response on any of those issues. They must be getting them and ignoring them as when it disabled my serial number they responded quickly. (Apparently as I stated before, if you move the app to another machine then unlike pretty much every other app, you don't delete it and reinstall, you have to search for and download an unnamed utility (reporter), then run that to uninstall, then reinstall). I mean it's almst as if they are deliberately trying to get you to buy new licenses rather than legally using the one you bought!).

A *quick* solution, sorry give me a minute while I try to stem the laughter.

Ah, there we are, good luck with that. 

Like I said, months if not years and I am still waiting.

Still, they say there are Christmas miracles so who knows. Sorry got to go, Santa and the Tooth Fairy have just dropped in for tea.

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EyeTV4 - 4.0.0 - 8526  (also briefly on 8528 which doesn't appear to fix anything.)

Tested on iMac - Late 2015 & Mac Mini - Late 2014; also vm in parallels 17 & vmware 11 (not Monterey)

macOS : Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur & Monterey

 

PROBLEMS:

  • Date shown at the top but no DAY
  • Display forever jumping back up when you try to scroll to see what is on
  • If you try to click on 3 sequential programmes and schedule them, after each one the display jumps wildly to some other vertical position making the process unbelievably difficult and tedious.
  • Always opens the main window with a large gap at the top and ignores previous size/position
  • Favourite channels after app quit/open is always shown in list mode
  • Frequent crashes
  • Recordings list doesn't update until you exit & re-enter it
  • Scroll the guide and it stops on mine with 8am at the far right, to see 8am onward you need to move to tomorrow in the top bar then scroll all the way back to the left! You can’t scroll or use the pop down.scroll guide and it stops on mine with 8am at far right, to see 8am on you need to move to tomorrow then scroll all the way back to the left! 
  • Often opens up a window or two on startup without being asked
  • Often the first window it automatically opens is huge not normal size.
  • Under the Window menu there is often 1 or 2 tv windows that I had no idea were open, no sound until I select them to close
  • No longer exports, managed one but since then nothing. It creates an empty file but that's it.
  • Change channel by pressing a number in full screen mode and it changes, the info box does not go away, the app is (not responding) for ever until it’s force quit.
  • If you have rules then they are always visible at the top you can’t pop them down or hide them.
  • Can sort some windows but not guides, v3 just click a title
  • Can't sort epg's by anything other than date
  • Frequently lose the top of a guide so have to max/min to reset
  • No indication on top time bar of when recordings are scheduled so can’t quickly tell if you have things set 
  • Recordings & Schedules view are nowhere near as clean and easy to read as v3
  • Doesn't remember recent searches
  • Some recordings, when playing back if you press the right arrow to jump 30s instead it goes straight to the end
  • Numerous support contacts, all ignored  
  • It uses 20-25% CPU when it isn't doing anything (or rather shouldn't be doing anything, no idea what it is actually doing though it seems to have a lot of open files).
  • It seems to be impossible to turn sharing off. Turn it off, go to another tab, go back, hey presto it turned itself back on. iPhone access is off, no reason that it should be enabled at all. -- deleted eyeconnect to stop it running
  • Couple of occasions it has recorded a different channel to the one specified. Thankfully rare.
  • A number of recordings have jumps or missing seconds in them. Makes it hit and miss as to whether it's watchable.
  • Often doesn't remove completed schedules
  • When I open a new window it’s a toss up if there will be any sound. If not then I need to keep opening/closing until it eventually gives in and turns sound on. It isn’t the level, it isn’t muted, it’s just b*ggered.
  • Record two programs one after the other. Open the first from recordings to watch while it is recording. When the next one starts to record, rather than doing it in the background it jumps into the window you were watching.  It does record it into a second file as it should using the other tuner but it shouldn’t override the one you are/were watching. You have to close that, go back to recordings, re-open the original program to continue. v3 would just play the one you selected to the end, rather like you would want it to!!

Workarounds:

  • missing counts of items in each list - tap sizes and it displays
  • schedules don't list description despite huge unused space - does in M & L just not smallest
  • Often Live TV stops every second, impossible to watch - unplug aerials & usb then re-plug in
  • after v3 to v4 upgrade the channels were wrong, none of the schedules ran. Had to Rescan them and then fix all the schedules so that they had the right channel specified.
  • If you have more than a screen full of rules (38 for me) then it is impossible to get to the last ones in edit mode (as soon as you add/delete then it jumps to a full screen of rules). - to get to rules 39+, save, move to a different guide, go back, scroll the top rules to the one you need, edit it, then repeat the whole process starting with ‘save’ for any other changes.
  • If you add/delete a rule it resizes the main window and goes under the dock, makes it difficult to read the last few items and impossible to see the last 2 as it won’t scroll to them, you have to resize it back down before you can get to them.

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Roland,

Not sure if these might help, I did a search on my startup disk for elgato & eyetv just to find all the relevant installed items. In case you want to try troubleshooting. if you want me to check anything then let me know. I am running Catalina at the moment on the iMac, Monterey on the Mini but have High Sierra, Mojave, Big Sur and Monterey in Parallels.

I had a look with Pacifist but there wasn't anything terribly useful from that.  I also have manually removed EyeConnect as I mentioned previously as it was the only way to make it disable sharing!

First step after removing 8528 would be to have a general tidy up, caches, rebuild xpc - onyx or tinkertool system are quite handy. Might help. Not sure of your macOS experience. EtreCheckPro is a good tool as well.

If you have a vm app then that's a good way of messing about without damaging anything, I use CCC to image to an external usb drive then connect that to the vm and do a migrate into a clean macOS install. The only thing you need to remember is to disable the network in the vm thanks to geniatech's ridiculous licensing policy, no trial, obscenely expensive and not helpful in any way (not one user multiple machines, or 2 machines any number of users etc).

Anyway, in case any of it is of use.

Mark.

StartupDisk name contains Elgato.txt.zip StartupDisk name contains EyeTV.txt.zip

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Hi Cluttered

Thanks for your kind support. As soon as possible I will try to remove all remainings of 8528 by using your list. Most probably, 8528 placed a code into my systems that is not yet recognised by the EyeTV reporter for a full and proper deinstalling. 

By the way: Send your complaints to this address: suggestion@geniatech.com

I managed to get in touch with the responsible people in China. They alreaday asked for crash records and screen shots. Most probably the 8528 is already a result of my interventions. At least they tried to publish a quick fix for the the missing audio stream to the iOS app plus some fixes for Monterey – unfortunately without success, in my case.

Regards, Roland

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Installed 8528 on an iMac 27" retina (2017 model) with big sure 11.6.2 on, it DOES work, no better nor worse than 8526. I am using it with a HDHomeRunDuo.

On the other hand on an iMac-M1 silicon, icon has the void sign on, and it does not run ("not supported" message as reported by others).

What a bad end for a once wonderful software... 😞

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Watch a program while it is being recorded. Then at the end double click it, instead of dropping down to the cmd-3 window size it barely shrinks and remains almost full screen.

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You cannot uninstall it like normal apps otherwise they disable your serial number and you have to raise a support ticket and then wait until support deigns to contact you. Instead you have to download eyetv reporter, which isn’t shipped with or mentioned by eyetv4, then use that to remove it before reinstalling on another machine. No other app I have ever used works like this!

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