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I am a mac user and have used this. http://www.formac.com/webapp/products_av_studiodv. php It integrates automated recording/scheduling with titantv.com. My computer room is close to the tv room with a unfinished utility room adjacent to both. So I have this going from the satellite receiver to the Mac Pro's firewire port. I have the second DVI out from the video card going back to the TV so I can watch the video from the computer's hard drive on the TV. I use ILife to edit the video and burn to DVD when I want. The major missing feature to this is commercial skip. But, I already had everything except the studiodv. OK, I had a Dual G4 when I first set this up, and have since had it hooked up to G5's and such as I upgrade, but you know what i mean. :-)

I think it's a Formac monitor.
http://www.formac.com/

I always liked the "Gallery" products from ForMac even though they cost a little more ($599) than the economy monitors. I've had one for several years now with my PowerMac and the quality remains great. I wonder how it would stack up against these economy monitors.

I would suggest the Formac TVR, it's about $30 less and does analog out. I've looked and there are a bit more complaints about Elgato's quality. I know it doesn't encode directly to MPEG, but when you have a chip do it for you, that sort limits your editing capability.

Now if someone would only come up with a good time-shifting TV tuner of this quality for the Mac.

Someone else mentioned the El Gato solution for this, but I would highly recommend the Formac Studio. It costs more, but it is also much more capable--it can take Composite and S-Video inputs as well as the regular coax for tv. Beyond that, I personally think it has much better quality (I tried both before buying the Formac). As well, there is a 3rd party app (Vidi) for the Formac Studio that I think is better than any viewing/recording app I have used on either Mac or Windows.

Ever seen a movie on regular tv with no adverts? its heaven!

However, in the past years I got used to Cinema and DVDs, and quickly realized that even if you have add-free TV, many movies are crippled beyond recognition. Most violent or erotic scenes are shortened or removed. While this doesn't hurt the plot of your average Schwarzenegger flick, many artsy films involving such elements (think Coen) get totally destroyed and turn into a confusing waste of time.

So after a short intermezzo, I'm without TV again, and use the Formac Studio to play PS2 games on a 20 inch monitor at 85 Hz.

There is such a thing as a firewire TV tuner.

This is the only one I know of: Formac Studio TVR . It outputs a standard DV stream, but it may only work with Mac OS X for tuner control/channel selection.

Huh? The poster clearly asked for cross-platform solutions, with a heavy emphasis on linux. As far as I know, ATI does not provide a version of their software suite for linux.
Hauppauge cards are supported by a variety of linux PVR software, as well as various commerical programs under windows. Microsoft Media Center???

Further, most modern external PVRs use a firewire interface, and not USB or serial (yes, I am aware that technically many standards fall under 'serial', but I think it's reasonable to assume that parent meant good old RS232 COM ports. Why would anyone use that for video transfer is beyond me).

...that's really, really tough.

Anyone know a way to add a internal dvd burner to a ibook?

Well, there was the Macintosh TV, which was released in 1993.

Youc could also get the El Gato EyeTV for $199. It let's you watch and record.

Or you could get the Formac Studio TVR for watching TV and analog to DV conversions for high-quality copies of your TV programs/videos, that's $399.

Apple's stuff is indeed droolworthy, but their support for their flat panel displays is less than stellar. If you take a look at a competitor's page, you'll see that Apple won't accept a panel as defective unless there are ten dead pixels in the display, an unnacceptably high number in my opinion. Furthermore, their displays aren't supported (to my knowledge - haven't checked their site) for longer than a year.

The obvious solution: get the dream system, but buy your two displays from Formac (or other manufacturer of your choice) instead.

Apple's stuff is indeed droolworthy, but their support for their flat panel displays is less than stellar. If you take a look at a competitor's page, you'll see that Apple won't accept a panel as defective unless there are ten dead pixels in the display, an unnacceptably high number in my opinion. Furthermore, their displays aren't supported (to my knowledge - haven't checked their site) for longer than a year.

The obvious solution: get the dream system, but buy your two displays from Formac (or other manufacturer of your choice) instead.

For most companies, testing and finding out on a per monitor basis would fracture the pricing scheme too much. Many companies already have very complicated replacement policies, such as, 5 stuck red pixels, or 3 green pixels, since green is more stimulating to human vision. You have to keep in mind that pixels can be completely dead (black), or fail to show a particular RGB color, or fail to turn off a particular color. Companies make all sorts of distinctions because a particular color stuck on or off will not interfere with displaying certain colors. Also, some companies will replace a screen with less pixels bad if they are in the middle of the display, and some have policies regarding the closeness of the pixels to each other, as in two bad pixels in the area of a quarter will get you a replacement. Any company would rather make a complicated return policy than a complicated pricing scheme.

But one company is sorta doing what you suggest: Formac has their Oxygen line of displays, which are very attractively priced LCD's. A 17.1" for $500, and a 20.1" for $999. These things have amazing contrast ratio's super bright elements, fast refresh, and outstanding viewing angles. Their priced about 40% lower than their Platinum counterparts even though they perform identically. Their difference is their dead pixel policy is more lenient. Oxygen's have a 1 yr warranty, and a 7 dead pixel policy. Platinum's have a 3 year warranty and 2 dead pixel policy.

So its kinda cool if you don't mind a few bad dots here and there.

1. Turn on Formac DV.
2. Plug RCA/Coax/S-Video into Formac DV/TV.
3. Turn on iMovie or BTV.
4. Done.

From there, I can capture movies (and convert to MP4, add effects, etc), or capture screenshots. No muss, no fuss.

Formac has a device that will turn your Mac into a TiVo-equivalent. It's pricey, $399. Here's the product description from their website:

Formac studio dv/tv turns your Mac into a fully functional TV and a high-quality digital VCR. Watch up to 125 channels in a scalable window or full-screen. The studio tvr software* allows you to record your favorite TV shows at any time and day, even if you are not at home (via remote scheduling). Use TitanTV's website to receive an up-to-date online program guide for your region, and use the one-step scheduling feature to record your favorite shows. Movies can also be recorded from and to any video device with RCA or S-VHS connectors, such as a standard VCR, Camcorder or DVD player. All movies are captured in high quality digital video (DV).

If Apple was gonna do something, it would do it right with something like this.

I know, I know, you are going to complain that Mac's are too expensive but the new $999 iBook is a steal (bought one for the mother-in-law), it doesn't crash like windows xp, lets them explore open source software and there is going to be a lot more cool stuff they can do than with a linux box like iMovie -- that will keep them out of your hair for weeks and you don't need a DV camera. Evidently, the kids in Maine are going ape-manure over their iBooks.

the Formac Studio/TV does this but it has firewire and with much better quality. Yes, it's 2x the price of El Gato's recorder, but the quality will probably make it worth it.

Formac devideon superdrive is the world's first external solution to bring affordable DVD creation to the Apple Macintosh. The new FireWire DVD-R/RW & CD-RW drive is based on Pioneer's new DVR-A04 technology, and comes bundled with Formac's proprietary DVD authoring software.

I wish I could record TV to MiniDV, though...

Get a digital-analog bridge and you can. I've been using a Formac Studio with no problems. RCA/SVideo in, Firewire out or vice versa.

I don't know first-hand about FireWire printers, but the FireWire ports seem to be used more for somewhat "specialty" items that need the grunt FW gives. There are plenty of audio and video devices that utilize and depend on FireWire.

At the very least, many musicians use external FW drives to stream digitial audio to, making it very easy to take that raw data to another machine for mix-down, collaboration with other artists, &etc. I'm guessing the video production folks do the same thing.

Don't forget about the various digital media players out there. Very few of these are going to be USB in the future.

There's always firewire. The Formac tuners are firewire, probably Apple-centric, but capture at 720x480. The higher end version even includes a 48gb HD. Both convert analog to DV and have radio tuners; The $399 version is what I'd end up getting if I were in the market for one. I don't know how well these would be supported in other platforms, but it's still nice hardware.

Try here for a great firewire capture and output device. It supports all movie formats. It's mainly for Macs but since its firewire I'd think it could work for anything that supports firewire since it just outputs DV.

External superdrives will soon be availble...

...and it's the next model up (A-04) from, the one being put into Apple boxen currently.

It's another formac product http://www.formac.com/html/shopformac.html?cid=sho p_products_devideon

the Formac Studio DV/TV(R) would be the better solution?

Storage wallet..got it...take a look at this from Formac...might just be the ticket.

studio DV/TVR

I use a Palm IIIC and a Palm m505 as 'image wallets'. I can store images on the card in the slot on the m505, 64mb, as an example, and both work as small digital picture frames, with slideshows, etc. IR lets me move images between units, if that's needed, and both have snap on cameras. Not anywhere near the megapixel range you quote, but as they say, any picture is worth 1k words.

Also, with a media encoder you could easily capture from VHS...perhaps you could do it on the fly but you would want a different machine to do it. This thing claims to be able to capture video thru a coaxial feed.

I wonder if Aliaswavefront knows something we don't about the video for Mac situation. They are releasing Maya 3 for OSX early next year (and Linux too). Running Maya with an ATI Rage 128 or even a Radeon will seriously limit what it is capable of. I've seen Maya demoed on an Irix SGI and my brother-in-law is currently running Maya 3 on NT with a 3Dlabs Oxygen RPM video card. He is a huge Mac fan and the rest of his software is already on his G4. He wants to switch it over to his Mac and I'm his technical support so I have been looking into the options. I don't have a Mac of my own but have become more interested as time goes on. I guess I will need to renegotiate my salary before I buy a G4.

Assuming you're using it to drive a 1600SW, you should get rid of it and get a Formac ProFormance 3. According to the reports I've read on the net, using the RevIV with a Mac is just painful. (The ProFormance 4 is just coming out now , but I don't know if works with the 1600SW {it should since it has LVDS output and can handle well over 1600 x 1024}. If it does, that might be an even better choice, though spendy {~$600).)

eBay has two Proformance 3s for sale at this time, one for $50. While you're there, you can sell your RevIV for $50 to $100, depnding on how good your ad is.

Yet-another-option(tm): Take advantage of Formac's trade-up-deal-for-unhappy-RevIV-owners(tm).

Assuming you're using it to drive a 1600SW, you should get rid of it and get a Formac ProFormance 3. According to the reports I've read on the net, using the RevIV with a Mac is just painful. (The ProFormance 4 is just coming out now , but I don't know if works with the 1600SW {it should since it has LVDS output and can handle well over 1600 x 1024}. If it does, that might be an even better choice, though spendy {~$600).)

eBay has two Proformance 3s for sale at this time, one for $50. While you're there, you can sell your RevIV for $50 to $100, depnding on how good your ad is.

Yet-another-option(tm): Take advantage of Formac's trade-up-deal-for-unhappy-RevIV-owners(tm).

The kinds of things that the DV iMac is capable of have been in the hands of the general public...for years

Sorry, there is no PC-equivalent to iMovie. You can pretend, but making a movie on a PC is not easy.

As for your concerns about video cards for gamers, the VooDoo 4 and VooDoo 5 cards will ship with native Mac drivers. If you really want to get in the game, try a Formac video card with 3D glasses and *real* 3D.

I'm sorry you feel insecure enough that the color of your computer matters.