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....
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