HdHomerun,EyeTv3 and Choppy Video

[PcBgone]

I recently purchased an hdhomerun from el gato, which also came with eyetv 3. I have an apple time capsule with a sr macbook. I had assumed that with wireless n, running 5ghz, would be enough to watch tv wireless...however the video is very choppy. I then plugged it up to a cat5 cable, and it still is choppy...but not as bad. The macbook is the only thing connecting wirelessly...and then I have a pc connected with cat5...

Any ideas how to resolve the choppiness?

 

[MikeEvangelist]

There is generally no problem watching from the HDHomeRun over wireless, but it may be that you have interference which is limiting your throughput. With a wired connection, it should be no problem at all. If you restart the HDHomeRun and your Mac, does it still stutter? How much RAM in the MacBook? (if less than 2GB, you may be running into virtual memory use, which will definitely affect performance.)

If you can't get this working, you may want to stop by our forum at forum.elgato.com and I'm sure you'll find help.

Mike Evangelist
Elgato

 

[PcBgone]

There is generally no problem watching from the HDHomeRun over wireless, but it may be that you have interference which is limiting your throughput. With a wired connection, it should be no problem at all. If you restart the HDHomeRun and your Mac, does it still stutter? How much RAM in the MacBook? (if less than 2GB, you may be running into virtual memory use, which will definitely affect performance.)

If you can't get this working, you may want to stop by our forum at forum.elgato.com and I'm sure you'll find help.

Mike Evangelist
Elgato

Thanks for the help Mike, I have searched the forums at elgato...but havent found anything regarding choppy playback. The macbook has 1gb of ram, so maybe it is the virtual memory use that is causing the problems. I have both restarted the mac and the hdhr, yet have found no difference, other then using cat 5, the video is choppier then wireless.

I will be getting an Imac Friday, which will come with 2gbs of ram, so I will test that theory out.

What type of inteference could cause the choppy video? How would I find this out? I love the idea of the HDHR, and the software from what I have used is excellent! So I want to get this working right!

Thanks,
Tony

 

[MikeEvangelist]

It is relatively common to have interference which is greatly reducing your network throughput, but to not notice it with typical usage (web browsing and email).

The HDHomeRun puts out approximately 2MB per second when watching one channel.

One way to see if you have enough bandwidth would be to set up file sharing between two Macs, one wired and the other wireless, then copy some large files from one to the other. Open the Activity Monitor while the copying is going on to see the network transfer speed. If it is not at least 5MB/sec, that would probably explain the problem.