EyeTV Stuttering - Page 2

So why not just switch back to Snow Leopard? Any reason that can't be done?

No, a 2011 Mini can boot into Snow Leopard.

I hate to bring this up again, but with the 3.5.5 update I've run into a similar problem. I use my iPhone to stream content from my Hauppauge! HDPVR down to my second generation Apple TV in the kitchen. Since the update and another OS update, I have a problem where the audio and video stutter badly using this same configuration to the point where it's unwatchable.

In the past, I've actually watched whole football games without problems, but this isn't working now. Since Elgato ended its forums and switched to Facebook for support, there's really no way to compare notes or seek out support. I suppose I could switch back to 3.5.4, but I'm not sure that would solve the problem. Recordings seem to be fine as I export them and then watch later on my Apple TV (2nd and 3rd Generation). I'm using a 2010 Mac Mini Server.

Is this the same problem that this thread was started about?

Dennis

Still running 3.5.2 on SL & a MBP with no stuttering, and won't upgrade until there's a need. Here's the Elgato Knowledgebase article telling how to download any past version of EyeTV you want;

http://support.elgato.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=4323

Had video stutter problems with most of my channels (not all though) on Lion running eyetv 3.5.4. Tried multiple suggested solutions with no fix. Updated to Mountain Lion and 3.5.4 ran fine with no stutter on any channels and I can confirm that it runs fine with the latest eyetv 3.5.5 update. Soo happy to have live tv back on my 2009 mac mini.

Agreed, Mountain Lion is a huge improvement -- 2009 MacPro & 2011 Mini. Anyone running Lion -- upgrade!

I found upon upgrading to 3.5.5, live TV streaming was taking way more system resources on my Mac mini, (which resulted in unwatchable stuttering) so I went back to 3.5.4 and submitted a ticket with Elgato. I haven't heard from them.

I've got 5 macs at home. Seriously thinking about switching to Windows for PVR. EyeTV UI really is a stinker.

This issue has been driving me nuts for a year. In addition to the code posted on page one, I also did one other thing that I haven't seen mentioned. I reassigned my Live TV buffer location to RAM. Eye TV only allows a 1500MB buffer in RAM but that's not an issue for me because I never use it much. I can't say the picture never skips anymore, but it's definitely much much better now. I can live with an occasional hick-up (but I still don't like it). Elgato is a terrible company and I wish I could express just how much I hate them.

I went back to 3.5.4, but had the same stuttering problem until I changed the prefs for my Hauppauge! After that it started working properly (under Mountain Lion) and I haven't bothered to upgrade to 3.5.5, though it might work fine with same kind of preferences tweak.

Dennis

What preferences did you change? 3.5.5 has severe video stuttering for me. Reverting back to 3.5.4 fixed things.

What I found was that with 3.5.5, video skipping and stutteriness is terrible with 720i channels, but not 1080p -- the stuttering is really awful with "drop field" deinterlacing, but not as bad, though still awful, with "no deinterlacing" setting.

Is there a way to reverse this command? defaults write com.elgato.eyetv 'DisableDisplayLink' -bool yes

My menu really sucks now!
Thanks

I've toggled it back and forth with "yes" and "no"

This no longer seems to have any effect on Mountain Lion.

Thank you!

Hello !

After nearly a year, I finally found a solution to my problem.

I have a Mac mini 2009 with 4 GB RAM, and a 64 GB SSD disk. I am running Eyetv 3.5.5 with the latest Macosx 10.8.2. I have connected two Eytv's, a Eyetv Sat and a Sat Free. My programmes are recorded to a external disk connected over USB 2.0. For nearly a year, I got freezing pictures, every minute or so. This happened only with HD programmes.

Today, I installed the Developper Tools. Included with the package is an app called Instruments.app. I then tried to record the processes for a while, to see, what process caused the cpu usage to over 100% and make the movie freeze. Suddenly, at every peak in CPU usage, a process called mdworker was running. After some research on google, I found that this process is related to Spotlight.

So every several minutes, Spotlight is launching a background process. This has a direct effect to the cpu usage.

I then agin googled on how to disable this process, here is the solution:

disable spotlight
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

enable spotlight
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

After I disabled the process, all my problems with freezing pictures where gone. Everything ran totally smooth.

I hope, this may be some help !

_______________________________
Couldn't one just adjust the Privacy settings to keep Spotlight from indexing the EyeTV folders?

If you do that you also break the Mac App Store.
It's better to exclude disk and other things.
In my setup I only allow spotlight to index the /Applications folder so that the Mac App Store works but spotlight doesn't index anything else.

i had stuttering in fullscreen with overlays (menus) in 3.5.5, elgato recommended the DisableDisplayLink fix, but it didn't help, so i reverted to 3.5.4. same problem (w/o overlays) in 3.5.6, reverted to 3.5.4...

I had these same problems and what worked for me was to change Audio Output from "Digital Out" to "System Sound Output" in the menu bar up top. I hope it helps others.

I've been seeing the stuttering when streaming to my iphone/ipad.

The app plays normally for up to 6 minutes at times, other times it's failing almost immediately. Stuttering/bad audio sync/fast motion and just plain freezing are common.

EyeTV on my imac (2009 24" iMac w/ 8GB of ram) bounces between 60 and 90% CPU use - this is with the turbo HD 264 stick. Recording and viewing on my Imac are perfect - no stuttering, no playback problems. Recordings dumped into iTunes are very good.

I've submitted tickets to Elgato who actually did get back to me and had me try some software changes to troubleshoot -

I downgraded EyeTv to 3.5.4, took the turbo stick software back a couple of versions, upgraded the eyetv iOS app...no effect.

Almost seems as though the Turbo stick isn't being used as heavily as it should when live streaming. Still working with Elgato on support - the latest I heard from them (a coupe of days ago) was they were now looking into "general performance issues" with 3.5.6 and 10.8.X.

thanx, newmexican505, i tried that but still have stuttering (video, not audio) u probably have newer h/w than i do: minimac1,1;-} and i'm stuck @ 10.6.8...i'm reluctant to upgrade because i never had issues w/my applescripts & ired on 10.4, but on 10.6 i have intermittent failures:-\
Edited by airdrummer - 11/21/12 at 5:57am

Thanks for this suggestion. It certainly nailed down what my problem was.

I am running a MacBook Pro (2010) connected to my LCD Television. The Television passes through the Encoded Audio through via a Optical Out on the TV.

Everything was running fine until I upgraded to Mountain Lion (I just KNEW it was not going to be seamless...)

The only way I can get Dolby Digital sound to the Denon receiver is by using "Digital Out" in Eye TV (3.5.6). Any other output yields a 2 channel signal through the HDMI (Mini Display adapter). I was getting the stuttering on both live TV and recordings. Oddly enough, when I would export to iTunes, those recordings were perfect (except those recordings don't have 5.1 audio).

When playing a .eyetv file via the EyeTV interface, there's always stuttering. However, I can open the .eyetv package, and play the .mpeg file directly using VLC (with encoded audio output) and the video is fine.

I think this nails it down to the way EyeTV outputs "encoded audio" (at least in Mountain Lion). Lion was fine. I've played around with the Audio Midi settings in Utilities along with the audio tab in System Preferences. For whatever reason, the combination of EyeTV+Mini Display HDMI adapter+Mountain Lion doesn't work well.

I hope this helps someone.

-fate

I've recently gone back to EyeTV 3.5.6 after getting a SiliconDust HDHomeRun and replacing the hard drive in my recording Mac with an SSD that needed to be flashed with new firmware to work in my Macbook Pro. I'm running Mountain Lion on both of my Macs now and I still have stuttering problems when streaming to my iPhone/iPad. At least on the older Macbook Pro, that leads me to believe that it's a Lion/Mountain Lion problem that degrades performance as much as anything. I have the stuttering problem no matter whether I'm using the HDHomeRun via ethernet, my EyeTV 500 via Firewire or my EyeTV Hybrid via USB.

However, I've also noticed that not every channel stutters to the point where it's unwatchable. Using the HDHomeRun, I can pretty reliably stream from my Mac Mini using my iPhone 4s to my Apple TV 2nd Generation if the channel is 1080i. The 720p channels stutter badly. Most of the 1080i channels available here have Dolby Digital so I'm not sure it has much to with audio. Has anyone else noticed problems that depend on what kind of content (1080i, 720p or 480i) is being tuned OTA?

Also, as far as playback on my Macs, video pretty much unwatchable now on the Macbook Pro I use for recording, but about the same on the Mac Mini without any real stuttering to speak of. For the first time in a long time, I'm using the optical out on the Mac Mini instead of the HDMI that goes to my TV (which goes into my receiver via digital coax). I wish I had a lot more confidence that Elgato will still be in the Mac TV business next year.

Dennis

I've finally found a solution to this problem: a faster Mac. Using the lowest end retina Macbook Pro, there's no stuttering when streaming to my Apple TVs, my iPad or iPhone.

Dennis

With regard to stuttering when streaming live TV starting with 3.5.5, I've narrowed the issue down too. Starting with version 3.5.5, the ESStreamingKit.framework seems to require much more system horsepower.

I took this folder from the EyeTV v 3.5.4 package and dropped it into EyeTV 3.5.5 and 3.5.6:

EyeTV.app/Contents/Frameworks/ESStreamingKit.framework

*** After doing this, the live streaming worked just fine in 3.5.5 and 3.5.6 ***

I reported this to Elgato months ago. Support folks were initially very enthusiastic, but have since gone silent on the issue. Something changed in a major way with the ESStreamingKit.framework between 3.5.4 and 3.5.5 which made it much more resource hungry. I'll keep using the ESStreamingKit.framework version from 3.5.4 as long as I can.

Dan

thanx, i'll give that a try...

Is your problem with streaming?

Thanks, just tried your fix suggestion. Activity monitor reporting streaming kit taking no more than 20% of CPU now.

It was pegging to well over 80% before swapping in that older framework.

Nice find!