EyeHome can’t find my EyeTV content

If you have been reading recently you will know that I have upgraded my iMac to Leopard.

The majority of software and applications I use seem to have been working fine.

However last night I decided to use my EyeHome so that I could watch a recording of Merlin I had made earlier using EyeTV.

However the EyeHome could not find my EyeTV recording, and I knew I had some. The EyeHome could find video in my Movies folder and other content across the iMac but not the EyeTV recordings.

I did remove the relationship between the iMac and the EyeHome, restart the EyeHome application on the iMac, but no joy.

In the end I used Wi-Fi Access instead. One of the features of EyeTV following an update (version 2.5) was the ability to stream recordings wirelessly to an iPhone or an iPod touch. It’s simple to turn on, just go to the relevant section in the EyeTV preferences.

EyeTV Wireless Access Preferences

What this does is once EyeTV has finished recording a TV programme, it will automatically convert the recording into a format which will play on the iPod touch or the iPhone. This is then made available over your wireless network via a web interface.

So using an iPod touch I connected it to the TV, browsed to my EyeTV recordings using the URL given in the EyeTV preferences and played the recording.

This worked well (and the quality is better than the BBC iPlayer version).

Having enjoyed the episode of Merlin, I now wanted to work out why the EyeHome couldn’t find the EyeTV.

I did find this on the Elgato website.

If you are using EyeTV with EyeHome, then EyeHome thinks your EyeTV Archive is in the Library folder for your User account. In reality, it’s probably in the Documents folder, or somewhere else that you chose via the Recording Preferences in EyeTV. Due to this error, EyeHome can’t find your EyeTV recordings without help.

A symbolic link, that points from the true EyeTV Archive location, will solve the problem – name the link “EyeTV Archive”, and place it in the Library folder ( ~/Library/EyeTV Archive). In other words, put the link here:

Open the Hard Drive

Open the Users folder

Open the folder that’s named after your User account (it may have a House icon).

Open the Library folder

Place the link called “EyeTV Archive” in the Library folder

Most users can do this using SymbolicLinker.

In this way, you keep the EyeTV Archive wherever you like, but EyeHome will find a link to it in that Library folder.

My solution is going to be to move the default folder to the Library.

What is interesting is I am almost 100% sure that I did not change this preference and if I had I would have not put the archive in the Documents folder, but put it in the Movies folder.

This was a fresh install of EyeTV as when I upgrade an OS or change computer (or in this case change hard drive) I usually start with a vanilla fresh OS install and then add my applications as and when I need them. This avoids clogging the computer with applications I used once or rarely, and usually avoids problems following you around from the previous install to the new install. A good example of this is that my Canon printer now prints everytime.

Lets hope EyeHome works fine now.

So is it faster?

I have been using my new LaCie Poulton drive for over a week now and so far I am impressed with it. Running Leopard on it for my iMac means I now have a lot more free space over 700GB compared to the 15GB I seem to have with the original 250GB hard drive I had on the iMac.

So is it faster?

Yes!

It certainly appears to be faster, but I suspect that Leopard is also a factor as that made a difference with my MacBook Pro.

It was certainly a bit of a pain going through all my applications and re-installing them, re-activating some and finding the serial numbers of others.

Installing Leopard

So I have my new drive, a 1TB LaCie Poulton, and though it is not as quiet as I would like (well a 7200rpm drive is still quite noisy, but at least there are no noisy fans).

So decided to install Leopard on it and use it as a boot drive for my iMac. The iMac only came with a 250GB drive which is proving problematic, I am hoping with 1TB of space that I can at least have a little more room for “stuff”.

Rather than install Leopard direct, I decided to install from the iMac install disks and then install Leopard on top of that.

Once Tiger was installed, I went straight to Leopard. Once Leopard was installed I then ran Software Update, and of course forgot to change the energy saver settings, so as before, the iMac did a Vista on me and turned itself off whilst downloading a 560MB update – for 10.5.4

I will then need to decide which software to install that I will use.

Wondering if Office 2004 is Leopard compatible (I think it is) and wondering if CS2 is? Problem with both those is that they are both not Universal applications, so both rely on Rosetta as they are PowerPC applications, and as a result are quite memory intensive.

Will certainly be installing iWork ’08 and iLife ’08 and iMovie HD ’06 as well.

Still downloading the updates.

Leopard does a Vista on me…

In the past I have mentioned how sometimes Vista annoys me by doing what it wants, rather than let me get on with stuff, one example which particularly annoyed me was when I was downloading a file (a rather large file) and Vista decided that as I wasn’t actively involved with the computer it would shut itself down!

Now I did think that OS X would not be so selfish and would be more sensible.

Well was I wrong…

Okay OS X is nowhere near as bad as I have found Vista to be, it’s most certainly not perfect.

So what happened?

I had decided to install Leopard 10.5 on my iMac (on an external drive) and after installing from my Leopard install DVD, I went to Software Update to update to 10.5.4, which to my initial horror was a 560MB download, well that’s going to take some time, so I let it get on with it.

So you can imagine my annoyance when I came back to find that the iMac had fallen asleep!

I was downloading a file! No you were downloading a file, you knew you were downloading a file, yet you still fell asleep!

I will give OS X a little credit, at least when I resumed the download it didn’t start it again.

Now this looks interesting…

If you want to run Windows on your Mac, you have had up until now four main choices.

Now there is a fifth choice, Virtualbox from Sun.

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See “About VirtualBox” for an introduction.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

I have downloaded it, but not yet installed it or tried to run Windows on it. Certainly looks like it could be useful for a whole range of virtualization solutions.

Continue reading “Now this looks interesting…”

802.11n Airport Extreme update allows Time Machine backups

The latest Apple update for the 802.11n Airport Extreme now allows attached USB drives to be used as Time Machine backups.

This was always a disappointing non-feature of the 802.11n Airport Extreme that though you could share a USB drive wirelessly, you couldn’t use that same drive for your Time Machine backups.

It was especially disappointing as it had been mentioned in a lot of the build-up to Leopard.

Apple’s new Time Capsule did allow that functionality, and a lot of people were disappointed that still the 802.11n Airport Extreme did not.

This update fixes that and now you can.

New guides

I have published some new guides on my website.

Leopard Guides 

How do I find my Mac (OS X) shortname for 10.5 Leopard?

How do I find a Leopard 10.5 Mac’s IP address?

Windows Vista Business Edition 

Creating a new user account on Windows Vista Business Edition

How do I find a Vista Business Edition PC’s IP address?

Installing Bonjour for Windows on a Vista Business Edition PC.

Disabling Password Protected Sharing in Windows Vista 

Windows Vista Home Edition

Creating a new user account on Windows Vista Home Edition 

How do I find a Vista Home Edition PC’s IP address? 

Upgraded the Mac mini

I have just upgraded my G4 Mac mini to Leopard. I am intending to use it as a media centre under my television.

The upgrade went fine, and EyeTV 2.5.1 seems to work just fine under Leopard.

I am running it (currently) without a keyboard or a mouse and of course being a G4 Mac mini it does not have an Apple remote.

I do have an EyeTV remote, so when watching TV, I can use that.

In the meantime, I am using VNC and screensharing to control the Mac mini and will be using either my PowerBook or an UMPC to do the controlling.

It’s connected to my Airport Extreme (802.11n) by ethernet, so the fact that it has only 802.11g won’t be too much of an issue.

I have an (old) CRT Sony television, so I am using s-video to connect the Mac mini to it, so screen resolution is quite poor, but for video and images it seems to work fine.

Mac mini

If this works out, I will probably replace it with a newer and faster Intel Mac mini. This one only had 512MB of RAM, and I would prefer at least 1GB or more.

I will write more, as we see how it works out.

Password Protected Sharing

In the two guides I have written (so far) on sharing files between Macs and Vista PCs, Sharing files between a Windows Vista Home Edition PC and a Mac running OS X Leopard 10.5 and  Sharing files between a Windows Vista Business Edition PC and a Mac running 10.4� I did not disable password protection on the Vista PCs.

This meant that users sharing files needed to enter a password (or have a matching account) in order to access shared folders on the Vista PC.

Password Protected Sharing

However if you turn off password protected sharing it is possible to share files without for the user on the remote computer who is accessing the shared folder to use a password.