Not raining, pouring

Just before I left for a week of business travel, my Optoma HD72 decided to start acting up. So not only does the basement have no OTA TV at the moment, the internet TV is out of action until I can get this fixed. Searching on Google suggests that the cause of the symptoms I see are a defective color wheel (or color wheel sensor). Many posts indicate that dust/dirt on the color wheel sensor  can cause this, and cleaning can get rid of the problem. Unfortunately, this means surgery when I get home to open up the box and give it a good clean out.

On the bright side, many users report successful cleanings, so I am hopeful. However, I am sure this will be a stressful job.

Updates at the weekend when I've had a chance to run this.

Quit while you are ahead

After a bit of tinkering, I have still been unable to get satisfactory performance from the EyeTv One. The s/w seems OK, but I am concerned that the h/w is too flaky. After lots of deliberating I have decided to return the EyeTV one back to Amazon and seek a different solution. The returns process seems pretty slick, but since this is the first time that I have used it, I'll report on how it goes when the credit is returned.

I now need to find an alternative solution for the projector in the basement. Currently I am looking at a couple of different options....

Elgato HD Home Run : This uses a different hardware solution but with the same EyeTV software as the other Elgato products. A little more expensive, but it does provide a 2 tuner solution. Research under way on this.

Kworld HDMI based HD TV Tuner : This provides a TV only solution with no PVR function.

Channel Master CM7001 : Another option for the TV only tuner.

Many of the cheaper DTV tuners only seem to have SD video interfaces as they assume that you have an older SD TV with no ASTC tuner. For the few of us with projectors we need a box with an HD output and that gets more expensive...

Hey, looks like I'm watching the Stanley Cup playoffs on the samller HD panels at home for the time being. Go Sens Go !

Good for Sens, Bad for EyeTV

A great comeback win for the Sens last night in OT, but no thanks to my EyeTV. The solid performance on the hub from the night before evaporated and it was giving me the same performance as for the Red Wings game. Sad. I have not been able to get this longer term reliable and gave up watching and went and used a (little) TV for the rest of the game.

Currently searching forums and deciding how to proceed with this to a reliable solution...

TV Teething !

The RF amplifier arrived yesterday and was quickly patched into my cable room. This now delivers 12 (or 13, I haven't done the check to see if some channels are duplicated) channels to the the 3 TV locations in the house. Grand ! Just what I was hoping for.

I had also set up the EyeTV One to record the Red Wings vs Predators game as a test to pipe clean the process before the Sens game (Go Sens Go!) tonight. This did not run quite so smoothly. The EyeTV woke up at the required time and started recording no problem (even though the kids were watching the BBC iPlayer (via the VPN) at the same time. We started watching the game about an hour in and the recording worked OK to start. After about 15-20 minutes the picture started breaking up, getting blocky and juddery. Hmmm. Skipping through the recording to the live point showed that this only got worse as the recording continued and was still bad when live. I restarted the EyeTV app and the signal came back clean. I initially thought that this may be due to me using an external USB HDD to record the show, so I set that back to the internal HDD for the buffering. After about 15 minutes of watching the game live the picture broke up again. Restart EyeTV and we're back again. After a couple of these my wife went to watch the game on another TV to leave me to tinker with the problem (thanks !).

Internet searching suggested that I should try a powered USB Hub between the EyeTV hardware and the Mac mini. I ripped a hub out of my iMac install upstairs and tried this. Bingo. I ran for almost an hour without any breakup and the solution seemed a lot more robust.

I programmed the EyeTV for the game tonight and we'll see how it goes tonight for real....

Cut Off Day !

Today is cable tv cut off day in our house ! Final preparations have been going on over the weekend - in between kids hockey - and I have installed the final RF cable to route new OTA antenna, via a splitter, to my basement equipment room so that we can watch the Stanley Cup playoffs on the projection TV. Pulling the cable was the biggest pain - a sore arm and a lot of swearing later and I have it fed through the basement ceiling cavity so it is invisible for my wife. I connected it up to the EyeTV One and installed the s/w on the Mac mini. Boom, 12 channels tuned in and worked perfectly. I am hoping that when my RF amp arrives I can take this to 14, but time will tell. I have not set up the PVR functionality yet (no time last night) but I can watch HD CBC so we're good for the playoffs.

I'll get the PVR set up soon and report in more detail on the progress... and life without cable TV.

New Toys!

I believe that my Elgato Eye Tv One (Eye TV One) has arrived in the post today. This should let me get OTA HD onto the Mac Mini in the basement before the cable goes next week. Given that it is Stanley Cup playoff time (Go Sens Go!) I will likely not get to trying this before the weekend. That said, this is my route to OTA PVR so I'll post on progress soon.

Install pt.1

Over the Easter weekend, we had part one of the install. This involved mounting the antenna in the loft space of the garage, running a cable down the garage wall and drilling a hole through the garage into my basement cable/panel room.

The antenna (Monoprice HD antenna) is pretty small, but experience says it is also pretty directional. Fortunately one of my TVs has a signal strength meter, so I dragged that out to the garage and set about aligning this for best performance. I had checked out the TVFool Signal locator (enter your post code to get a map of the local transmitters) so that I could get an approximate alignment. I then used the signal strength meter on the TV to improve the alignment. Using the grey bar on the front of the antenna to determine the optimal direction, I ended up with a NE alignment, between the 2 transmitters that I can see. I managed to get 14 channels with this (the maximum I think I can get without a much larger antenna/amplifier combo), but the alignment was pretty sensitive.

I then ran the cable, brought it to the splitter in the cable room and started to distribute it around the house. This seemed to have a significant impact on the TV's ability to receive the channels and (using a 3 way passive splitter) one TV could get 12 channels, but the other could only get 6 reliably. It seems I need to invest in a distribution amplifier to get full channel coverage at all my TVs. That is going to be part 2 of the install, along with adding over the air PVR functionality to my Mac mini to provide timeshifting capability. Watch this space for updates.

Cable cut off date is coming (one week now) and so pressure is on to get this all set up prior to that going... particularly since this is Stanley Cup Playoff time !!

Easter Bunny

The Monoprice order has arrived and been distributed. I will be installing over the weekend and will post an update with progress.

Shipping working well

As of 6:30 this morning the Monoprice order is in Mount Hope, Ontario. Fingers crossed for a Thursday arrival.

Antenna on way

Some friends and I have ordered up some antennas and cables from Monoprice (one of my favorite budget on-line stores) and the shipment is in progress. Currently they are in Louisville, KY for Export scan. With a bit of luck we may have them here in time for the Easter weekend and then the installation begins in ernest!

A few people have suggested that I start blogging my thoughts and progress of cutting off my cable TV service and moving to an Over The Air (OTA) and Internet TV model. Having not blogged before, this is a bit of an adventure, but I hope you'll find this interesting.