I am running a Mac Mini as a HTPC in my living room. It has, among other things, Elgato EyeTV 3 software and an Elgato DVB-T tuner USB stick. All that worked fine for about a year, then EyeTV started to fail to tune into channels; the USB stick just “disappeared” from the USB port. The only cure was to plug it out and plug it in again. Then it worked for some moments, to be disappearing again. Lately, just changing a channel a few times was enough to kill the stick.
Of course I suspected software, as both the Mac OS X and the EyeTV 3 software had been updating on several occasions. So I tried all the old versions of EyeTV, reinstalling, clearing out all cached things, installing again, trying different settings, reading about USB, trying to find a way to debug USB etc. etc. I never thought the USB stick would break so that it would work perfectly for some time, then just die. Then work again after replugging. Well, that is what happened. Hardware died just a bit after the warranty became void.
Solution: I bought a new EyeTV Hybrid. I will need the DVB-C in a month anyway, so no big harm done. And now it works perfectly, just like the previous one a year ago. Hope it lasts a bit longer!
