Mavericks, Time Machine, and maybe EyeTV

[John Varela]

Just installed Mavericks and now Time Machine is unusable. Time Machine can be entered and appears to be working, but a large black rectangle covers most of the screen, blocking Time Machine's Finder display, making it unusable.

I suspect this is related to EyeTV because the black rectangle is the shape of an HDTV picture and, the few times I have seen it outside of Time Machine, EyeTV was running. The Time Machine problem is there whether EyeTV is running or not. I removed "EyeTV Helper" from the Log-in List and the Time Machine problem persisted, but then when I looked at the Log-in List EyeTV Helper was back there.

I am running the latest versions of both Mavericks (10.9.2) and EyeTV (3.6.5). The hardware is an iMac 10.1 and EyeTV HD. In addition to the 27" iMac monitor there is a 23" auxiliary monitor, which is where I usually run EyeTV. Moving the EyeTV picture from one screen to the other or changing its size has no effect on the Time Machine problem.

Can anyone help?

 

[jbarley]

maybe try going into 'Activity Monitor' and force killing the two instances of EyeTV that show up there, then run Time Machine.

 

[Cheryl]

After upgrading to Mavericks, does Time Machine recognize the drive you are using? If you have your hard drives showing on your desktop, the Time Machine drive icon will show a clock on it (Time Machine’s icon).

I found that even though it appears to be running, while in Time Machine preferences, you have to click on Select Disk, remove the drive listed in Backup Disks, then select the disk.

When you removed EyeTV Helper from the startup list, did you restart the machine?

 

[John Varela]

maybe try going into 'Activity Monitor' and force killing the two instances of EyeTV that show up there, then run Time Machine.

Good thought. However: EyeTV doesn't have to be running for this to happen. Activity Monitor shows only EyeTV Helper running. Killing it didn't change the effect.

I am convinced that EyeTV is the problem because, with it running in full screen mode in the auxiliary monitor, clicking on it or its remote causes the identical black rectangle to appear on the large monitor. I have made a bug report of this to Apple; they closed it because it was a dupe. Evidently no one tested EyeTV with Mavericks on a system with two monitors.

 

[John Varela]

After upgrading to Mavericks, does Time Machine recognize the drive you are using? If you have your hard drives showing on your desktop, the Time Machine drive icon will show a clock on it (Time Machine’s icon).

I found that even though it appears to be running, while in Time Machine preferences, you have to click on Select Disk, remove the drive listed in Backup Disks, then select the disk.

When you removed EyeTV Helper from the startup list, did you restart the machine?

Yes I did restart.

 

[Cheryl]

Just thinking... maybe you need to reinstall Eye TV.

 

[John Varela]

Just thinking... maybe you need to reinstall Eye TV.

I just tested and the problem has disappeared. I had reported the problem to both Apple and EyeTV support. I can only suspect that one or the other slipped in an update.