EyeTV USB tuner causes mac to hang on boot

[Oujmik]

Originally posted this in the Mac Mini forum, but having traced the issue to a peripheral, I thought I'd post again here.

I have a EyeTV Hybrid USB TV Tuner and a 2012 Mac Mini. They worked fine at first, but recently this issue developed:

When I try to boot with the tuner connected, the Mini hangs at the first white screen. This is before the Mini will respond to the keyboard to I can't safe boot or anything. I have verbose boot on, but again the white screen comes before anything appears.

As soon as I unplug the device, everything is back to normal and the machine boots. Swapping out other devices makes no difference.

When the machine is booted and I plug in again, sometime the tuner works fine, sometimes it isn't recognised at all (nothing in system profiler). In the latter case it often springs into life at random 2-10 minutes later.

Now for the weird thing. If the tuner has been working and I restart the machine, no problem. If I shut it down for ten minutes then boot, no problem. If I leave it off for several hours and then boot, back to the white screen. Similarly, if I restart before the device has started working, white screen.

This leads me to suspect that the device is not initialising properly. I read somewhere that USB devices have to exchange some messages with the computer before they will be recognised as USB 2.0/3.0 rather than 1.1. If this step fails the device does not receive enough power. Is this correct, could this be my problem.

I also read some weird stuff about people putting EyeTv/WinTV devices in the oven to cure a similar problem, but this seems a bit crazy. Although saying that the issue did start during a period of very cold weather...

Should add that I've tried a reinstall of EyeTV, SMC reset, NVRAM reset... some of these seemed to help temporarily but the issue always came back.

 

[Oujmik]

Just thought I'd post an update in case anyone ever searches for this post. I ended up replacing the tuner and all is fine.

However, I did find that weirdly the issue seems to be related to the temperature of the device. If I warmed it up in my hands or with a hairdrier, the issue resolved! Crazy but true.

 

[fhall1]

Sounds like the old one had a bad solder joint.....when you heat it up the two pieces of the joint would expand enough to make contact and "work" and when they were cool, they'd contract and lose contact.

 

[ActionableMango]

I've been HD tuning for years and I've been through many tuners. All the USB ones are generally unreliable and suck for one reason or another.

By far the Silicon Dust HD HomeRun is the way to go and has a multitude of advantages over the USB sticks. That is what I use now with EyeTV.

 

[Richdmoore]

I totally agree. I have had much more issues using a USB tuner vs the silicon dust tuner.

If eyetv was compatible with the cable card version of the silicon dust tuner I would replace my eyetv hd immediately.

 

[Waelman]

Hi there,

After some white screens on boot on my Mini 2012, I wonder too, about the Eye TV usb dongle.
What can I say is that from time to time the Mini stay on white (grey ?) screen, not so often but enough to upset me .
Well, after unplug all usb devices and a sms reset, all is fine .
So after searching some answers on the net, it's seems that I have a set close to the one of Oujmik .
A Diversity Eye TV usb dongle connected with an usb cable extension.
In my case, Eye TV soft works fine all the time, and the usb key is always seen by Mountain Lion.No issue at all for this.

I'll try to deconnect the Usb every night after shutting down, to see what happens on the next boots, for a few days.

Oujmik, if you have some news on your side, tell me