We recommend 802.11n or faster.

While the Cordcutter TV is compatible with WiFi standards 802.11g, 802.11n or 802.11ac (or faster), you are better off if your network is 802.11n or faster. The Cordcutter only needs about 10Mbits/sec per TV channel using the dual transcoders. But with 2 channels streaming to and from the router at the same time, you are using close to 50% of the available 'bandwidth' of 802.11g.

But 802.11n has 10x the speeds compared with 802.11g and should easily handle two live TV channels.

A few notes WiFi networks:

• WiFi neworks currently come in two bands: 2.5GHz and 5GHz. Cordcutter TV only works on the 2.5GHz band.
• most home Internet routers support both 2.5GHz and 5GHz bands. On your smartphone or tablet, you might need to select the 2.5GHz band when initially setting up Cordcutter TV. Example: a Spectrum router might have two names: 'Spectrum_5' and 'Spectrum_2.5' You would need to select 'Spectrum_2.5' in your smartphone/tablet Settings menu to choose the 2.5GHz band.

With Cordcutter TV firmware 413 or later, we have added a DVR recording feature which allows you to schedule TV recordings and record them onto a USB thumb drive plugged into the USB port on the back of the Cordcutter TV. You can them play the recordings back through the myTV app on iOS (iPhone/iPad), tvOS (Apple TV) or Android.

While we have tested up to 256Gb USB thumb drives, we have spoken with customers who have used external USB SSD drives up to 1 TB.

A few notes on recoding with Cordcutter TV:

• you need to have an NTFS formatted USB thumb drive. FAT32 formatted thumb drives will not work. If you have a FAT32 formatted thumb drive, you can do a quick reformat on a Windows PC and turn it into a NTFS drive.
• the DVR feature requires Cordcutter TV firmware 413 or later and Android app version 2.30 (or later) or iOS app 2.31 (or later).
• recordings made at HD+ will not play back on some Android devices. If you plan to play your recordings on Android, we recommend HD or Standard levels

There are three quality levels of recordings you can select with the Cordcutter TV DVR: HD+, HD and Standard. HD+ is 1920x1080, HD is 1280x720 and Standard is 960x720.

HD+ DVR recordings on the Cordcutter TV take about 4 GBytes per hour of TV. So, a 64Gb thumb drive will store about 16 hours of TV. A 128Gb thumb drive will hold 32 hours of TV recordings.

HD DVR recordings on the Cordcutter TV take about 2.2 GBytes per hour of TV. So, a 64Gb thumb drive will store about 30 hours of TV. A 128Gb thumb drive will hold 60 hours of TV recordings.

A few notes on recoding with Cordcutter TV:

• you need to have an NTFS formatted USB thumb drive. FAT32 formatted thumb drives will not work. If you have a FAT32 formatted thumb drive, you can do a quick reformat on a Windows PC.
• the DVR feature requires Cordcutter TV firmware 413 or later and Android app version 2.30 (or later) or iOS app 2.31 (or later).
• recordings made at HD+ will not play back on some Android devices. If you plan to play your recordings on Android, we recommend HD or Standard levels

To be used in Cordcutter TV, USB thumb drives need to be formatted as NTFS.

Many thumb drives, such as Sandisk, come pre-formatted as FAT32 and they need to be reformatted as NTFS. You can easily reformat a USB thumb drive on Windows. If you have a Mac, there are utilities which will reformat a USB thumb drive as NTFS.

A bad picture can be caused by several things. The first thing to check is your WiFi speed. If you read the FAQ above, you will see that while Cordcutter TV can support 802.11g, we recommend 802.11n or faster networks. We use an 802.11g router at Hauppauge for testing, and most times it works well until several people are using the WiFi network, at which time the myTV picture becomes pixelated. We recommend 802.11n or faster for best results.

The next thing to check is your antenna: if you have bad reception on your antenna, you will not get a good picture with the myTV app.

Last, you can adjust the Quality of the Cordcutter TV wireless transmission in the myTV app. From the main menu, click Settings and then Video Quality. Thee are three settings: HD Plus, HD and SD. HD Plus uses about 15Mbits/sec of your WiFi network, HD uses 8Mbits/sec and SD uses 4Mbits/sec. You might need to reduce the Video Quality to SD if you are having video picture problems. SD will still give you a great TV picture since it is transcoded.

You can mix and match devices with Cordcutter TV (for example: an iPhone and an iPad plus an Android tablet). The only limits are that you can only have two devices streaming from Cordcutter TV at the same time and all devices need to be on the same WiFi network.

To connect another device, on this device download the Hauppauge myTV app from your app store and install it. Open the app. You might see a message No device found. If you see this message, wait a few minutes for the myTV app to search your WiFi network for your Cordcutter TV. As long as your new device is on the same WiFi network as the first device and Cordcutter TV, they will 'find' each other.

Once you see Hauppauge Cordcutter TV listed under Device, you can now hit 'Scan Channels'. Once the scan is complete, you can hit 'Back' and go to Live TV to watch TV.

Please note: all devices connected to your Cordcutter TV must to be on the same WiFi network.

There is no limit to how many devices you can setup with Cordcutter TV, but you can only use two at a time. So, you can have many iPhones, iPads, Android tablets and phones plus AppleTV and Amazon FireTV connected to your Cordcutter TV as long as you are only playing live TV programs on two devices at a time.

Once you have two devices connected to Cordcutter TV and watching live TV, the next device you try to watch TV on will get a message 'All tuners are in use'.

When you open the myTV app on your iPhone, iPad or Android tablet or phone, put the device in 'landscape' mode (video running left to right). Tap your screen once and you will see the channel you are on and below the channel name and number, you will see a Pause/Skip Left/ Skip Right icons. The the right of these icons is a circle. Click the circle to start recording. The circle will turn red. Click again to stop recording.

On an Android device, these recordings are kept in the Internal Storage -> Movies -> Recordings. You can play them from the myTV app or you can play them from Internal Storage. On the iPhone/iPad, you can only play the videos from the myTV app.

Note: you cannot currently record on the AppleTV, Amazon FireTV or other devices. Stay tuned as we expand the recording capabilities in the future.

No. You can only see the pause, record, rewind, fast forward controls when you are in landscape mode.

Currently, Cordcutter TV only works to the limits of your router. For example, if you are at your swimming pool and are in WiFi range of the router, you can watch Cordcutter TV on your WiFi connected device. But if you are out of the WiFi range, you cannot watch TV from Cordcutter.

Adding streaming out of the house is on our list of things to add and this will be a software update.

Cordcutter TV has two parts, the 'firmware' inside the Cordcutter TV device and the myTV app which runs on your phone, tablet or media player. Hauppauge is continually upgrading the features and functions of Cordcutter TV, so we recommend you periodically update both the Cordcutter TV firmware and the myTV app

To upgrade the firmware inside Cordcutter TV, open the myTV app on your Android device or iPhone/iPad. Go to Settings. Under Device you will see Firmware Update. Hit this and you will be brought to a screen where there is a button which says Check for firmware update. Hit this button and you will be notified if there is a new firmware which you should install.

For beta releases of firmware, where Hauppauge adds features which might not be 'ready for prime time', we have a manual way to upgrade the Cordcutter TV firmware. Please see www.hauppauge.com/firmware for instructions.

To upgrade your myTV app, simply go the your app store (the Apple app store, the Google Play store or Amazon FireTV store) and download the app. Hauppauge always puts the latest app on the appropriate stores.

You are not doing anything wrong. Cable operators use QAM for both 'free' and 'encrypted' channels. Normally the free channels are ATSC channels which are rebroadcast unprotected on their cable networks. In addition, your cable operator may broadcast QAM TV such as local news, home shopping and other channels which might be interesting to consumers.

Hauppauge tries to remove the encrypted channels during the myTV QAM channel scan, but we have found that not all of the encrypted channels can be detected. So you might find that some of the channels listed after a QAM scan are encrypted and you will not see a TV picture.

Note: not all cable operators in North America transmit clear QAM TV. So check with your local cable operator for clear QAM availability.

Maybe. While Cordcutter TV is compatible with all FireTV boxes, some early FireTV sticks were not fast enough to run the Cordcutter TV streaming live TV. The newest FireTV sticks will work with Cordcutter TV, and like the FireTV box, you can find the Hauppauge myTV app for FireTV on the Amazon app store.

To add the myTV app to the Apps on your Fire TV box (or Fire TV stick if you have a compatible model), you need to first go to Amazon.com, log into your Amazon Prime account, search for the 'Hauppauge myTV' app, select the Amazon Fire device you want to install the myTV app on, and then select 'Get App'. Amazon will then load the Hauppauge myTV app on your Fire box or stick.

If you have a question on an older FireTV stick, please contact us at support@hauppauge.com and we will research your FireTV stick version and let you know if it will work.

Step 1: Go into the Adhoc WiFi mode on the Cordcutter TV

• unplug the power connector to Cordcutter TV
• push and hold the reset button when you plug in the power connector
• continue to hold for 10 seconds

Step 2: On your iPhone, select the CordcutterTV

• on your iPhone, go to Settings -> Wi-Fi and look for a Network called 'CordcutterTV_xxxx'
• tap on the 'CordcutterTV_xxxx' and wait until you get a check mark next to CordcutterTV.

Step 3: Open the myTV app and setup the WiFi password

• now open the myTV app, and go to Settings -> Cordcutter TV Setup -> Setup WiFi
• give it about 45 seconds to scan for all WiFi networks, and then tap 'Setup WiFi' at the bottom of the screen
• if you don't see a list of WiFi networks, you can tap the back arrow next to 'Configure WiFi' and then tap 'Setup WiFi' again. I find it might take as much as 1 minute to detect the WiFi networks.
• Select your WiFi network and enter your password

Tap 'Finish' and then wait until you see 'Hauppauge Cordcutter TV' in Settings.

Yes. Security is done through your WiFi password.

In order to be able to get TV video from a Cordcutter TV in your home, you need to know the password of your WiFi router. Devices like phones and tablets which do not know your WiFi password will not be able to 'log on' to Cordcutter TV.

The message "No Content" can be caused by two problems: a WiFi network problem or poor TV reception.

If your WiFi router gets bogged down with too much traffic, the myTV app cannot get video from the Cordcutter TV. When this happens, the myTV app will display the "No Content" message. To fix this, you might need to reset your router or upgrade to a faster router. If you are using a WiFi router based on 802.11g, consider upgraing to 802.11 "n" or faster.

You might also get a 'No Content' message if your TV antenna is not getting a strong signal.

Yes. All you need to do is setup each Cordcutter TV one at a time, just as you would if you only had one. The myTV app will ‘discover’ all of the Cordcutter TVs seen on your network and will list them in Settings -> Devices.

You can select the Cordcutter TV in Settings -> Select Device

If you would like to know which Cordcutter TV is which, in 'Devices' tap one 'Hauppauge Cordcutter TV', then look at 'Info' and then look at 'Serial Number'. You will see the corresponding serial number on the bottom of the Cordcutter TV (you’ll need to convert from Hex to Decimal).

If you see the recording listed in Scheduled Recordings, it should record. But if your recording is not listed in Recordings, there are a couple of things which might have gone wrong:

• your USB thumb drive is no longer plugged in (one user accidentally plugged his thumb drive into the Ethernet port. This will not work)
• your USB thumb drive is full
• there is no TV tuner available (you might have the myTV app running on one of your phones, tablets or media players, and they are using the TV tuner to get guide data, for example). To make sure, close the myTV app on all of your devices and then try to record again.
• if you have a Mac and formatted the USB thumb drive using NTFS, make sure that All Users have read/write access to the USB thumb drive. The Mac often sets All Users to Read Only, which will NOT record. If you see this, the best thing to do is reformat your USB thumb drive on a PC using NTFS. Windows does not automatically assign different read/write rights to different classes of users.

For Ethernet with Cordcutter TV, just plug the Ethernet cable from your router into the RJ45 jack on the back of Cordcutter TV. Cordcutter TV find the Ethernet connection in a minute or so, or you can power cycle the Cordcutter TV which will speed things up. But simply by plugging in Ethernet, it will be found (eventually).

To make sure you are running on Ethernet, go to:
Settings -> Hauppauge Cordcutter TV -> Info and look under 'Connection'. It will be either WiFi or Ethernet. Once again, it does take some minutes to make the Ethernet connection.

Once you setup WiFi, you should never need to push the reset button. Pushing the reset button on the back of Cordcutter TV puts it into a setup mode uses a backup firmware which is only used for the inital setup of Cordcutter TV. If the setup mode is not completed (for example, if you don't reset the WiFi password), then backup firmware stays on the Cordcutter TV and you lose important features like DVR recording.

If for some reason you want to reset Cordcutter TV, simply power cycle by removing the power connector. Then Cordcutter TV just resets and does not go into setup mode.

Remove the power connector from the back of the Cordcutter for a few seconds, and then plug it back in.