Mac PVR Coming Soon

mgrochmal writes "One of the items bouncing around the rumor mills is EyeTV, a TiVo-like device for Apple computers. Made by El Gato Software, it hooks up to one of the Mac's USB ports and captures MPEG-1 video, with a choice between a VideoCD-compatible recording, or a higher quality recording. You can read about a preview build of it, as well as read a comparison between it and a TiVo." It doesn't come with a hard drive; and here I was, thinking I wouldn't fill up my new 160GB hard drive any time soon. Silly me.

Comments

Let's hope they do a better job than ATi

[Clue4All]

ATi has marketed a couple of their cards with TiVo-like capabilities, and they are awful. It's not a driver issue this time (a first for ATi), but the software iself is crappy and unreliable. Without a Mac it won't do me much good, but it's nice that someone's going to give it another go.

Re:Let's hope they do a better job than ATi

[Anonymous Coward]

What is that link supposed to do in your sig? Nada on Mozilla / Win2K.

Re:Let's hope they do a better job than ATi

[tomcio.s]

Actually there is a CREATIVE LABS product out there (one of the blasters, you can find it on their site).
Its for PC and AFAIK it was rather stable.
Too bad I got an ATI-TVtunerUSB already.
Oh, and I believe it also did MPG2 compression on chip...
Now if I only had a link to it ;-)

Re:Let's hope they do a better job than ATi

[phong3d]

The only thing in the page source is this:

<object ID="dosIE-doe" CLASSID="CLSID:00022613-0000-0000-C000-00000000004 6"></object>

Nothing happened in Moz 1.1/WinXP, but IE6 died immediately. Cute :)

Re:Let's hope they do a better job than ATi

[Library Spoff]

...as did IE5.5/Win2k lets hope i'm not now rooted ;)

Re:Let's hope they do a better job than ATi

[rakslice]

How does bad bundled software make the cards awful? Although I haven't found the ATI TV tuner bundled software to be unreliable, it isn't as full-featured as the standalone PVRs. But, since there's a fair amount of better WDM-compatible PVR software out there, it's not like you're stuck with the quality of ATI's bundled solution...

Re:Let's hope they do a better job than ATi

[MaxVlast]

Are you a native speaker of English? If not, I apologize and you can stop reading now.

If you are, sheesh! I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I'm not sure one sentence makes sense.

Examples include "I've heard the PowerBook my Firewire hub if I remember on a Microtech Smartmedia/CF reader, and MS optical Intellimouse." and "If the bins until after all, but the PC market there's a couple of SCSI as slowly as an example, on my TiBook 667 I have several devices that'll ONLY work when either hooked."

What are you trying to say? I'm genuinely curious.

Re:Let's hope they do a better job than ATi

[Chasing Amy]

ATI's Mac PVR products are nearly useless. Their PC All-in-Wonder AGP and PCI cards are, however, the best such cards available, and will easily blow the doors off a Mac-based PVR with this new EyeTV thing. Why? For one thing, as mentioned on ArsTechnica, EyeTV is limited to MPEG-1 bitrates suitable for transmission over USB--in other words, low resolution crap.

Real PVR solutions with highest quality capabilities--MPEG-2 in full resolution with decent bitrates, for example--are only possible over the AGP or PCI bus. Such solutions are commonplace in the PC world, and many work wonders. They're almost unknown in the Mac consumer space because so many Mac users have iMacs that can't use them, or wouldn't want to tinker inside their towers, that it hasn't been deemed profitable enough yet.

Of course, it's possible a Firewire solution could provide high quality TiVo-like abilities for the Mac, but as of yet no one has tried.

Hmm.

[tomcio.s]

Yet another reason to buy a Mac platform...

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to the dozen alternatives that don't require a pc and the other dozen that work with Windows?

Whatever.

[supabeast!]

Great, now I can watch OS X render television just as slowly as it renders any other 2D graphics. Lame-assed quartz...

Re:Whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um. Quicktime and other video display are actually extremely snappy on Mac OS X, and at any rate have nothing to do with Quartz. Quicktime actually *bypasses* Quartz. Quicktime and OpenGL actually have special optimized hooks that allow them to talk directly to the display server without having to use display pdf as an intermediary. Look, you can read about it here.

USB? Ick.

[Space Coyote]

Give me FireWire, please. MPEG-1 video quality isn't going to cut it on a Mac, I'm afraid.

Re:USB? Ick.

[zephc]

USB has more than enough bandwidth for a TV video and audio signal.

I SO want one of these, seeing them just yesterday on their website. A friend's dad just got one for HIS Mac, and loves it, rejoicing in being able to get rid of his TiVo ;)

Re:USB? Ick.

[TeamSPAM]

I would tend to agree. The only reason I could see them going with USB is if they want to see this device in the PC market as well.

Re:USB? Ick.

[Dunkalis]

I agree. I use Macs at school for video editing (Final Cut Pro, not that iMovie stuff), and the footage captured is exactly like the real deal. Granted, thats just raw footage, and takes up an obscene amount of space. However, when we need to use cameras without FireWire ports, it becomes a pain in the arse to import it. From camera to DV tape to Mac, and there is a quality loss, since the camera is analog. This would be awesome, but MPEG-1? Granted, its for a PVR function, but still. If they made it FireWire, it'd give the option of importing the raw footage. Yet another cool gadget for a Mac that fails because it doesn't use the Macs full potential.

Now, if only I could convince them to put OS X on the machines...Then I'd be really happy. No more crappy OS 9!

Re:USB? Ick.

[dthable]

Most PC users should start seeing IEEE 1394 in the near future. Sony is really pushing to use it with their new digital hub like PCs and in their products. Besides, now that the Mac users have paid with their first born for FireWire devices, the market is prime for PC cheapskates to pick up on our trend.

Re:USB? Ick.

[jht]

I think for the design goal, MPEG-1 should be fine (it's just a cruddy NTSC signal, after all), but I'm not nuts about using USB for yet another device. I've already got enough USB devices, and some play nicely with a hub and some don't. USB is almost the second coming of SCSI as far as voodoo goes.

Just as an example, on my TiBook 667 I have 2 USB ports. On them are:

Port 1 - a MacAlly external keyboard and MS optical Intellimouse.
Port 2 - Belkin 7-port powered USB hub.

Then, attached to the hub I have a Palm USB adapter, one of those Griffin iKnobbie things (it's useless, but cool) a Microtech Smartmedia/CF reader, and a gamepad. But I also have several devices that'll ONLY work when either hooked up to the free port on the keyboard or directly attached to the PowerBook:

-DiskOnKey (128MB)
-Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX
-Olympus D-3000 digital camera
-Compaq iPaq 3765

So not only are my USB ports pretty darned busy, but I have devices that'll only work in a particular order and/or port. OTOH my Firewire port has only two devices that I connect, and then only when needed: an external hard drive and a Canon DV camcorder. And I could always get a Firewire hub if I needed one.

In general, most people are using their Firewire ports less, and if/when El Gato attacks the PC market there's a decent (and growing) number of PC's with that port (or you can add one for about $30). For their application, I think Firewire would have been a better choice.

-

Re:USB? Ick.

[bkim]

A friend's dad just got one for HIS Mac, and loves it, rejoicing in being able to get rid of his TiVo ;)

Are you serious? This thing is nowhere close to replacing my TiVo. I didn't see any mention of it being able to control DSS receivers or cable boxes.

Re:USB? Ick.

[ncc74656]

USB has more than enough bandwidth for a TV video and audio signal.

You're kidding, right? Maybe if it's compressed...and given the way USB was designed, I wouldn't expect to be able to do much with your computer while it's capturing. For an external gadget, FireWire would've been much better. DV would be a better capture format than MPEG; it's more easily edited (which is good for cutting ads out of stuff you want to archive). Sony has a device that converts analog video (composite or S-video) to DV and puts it out on FireWire...add a computer-controlled tuner to it and you'd be all set.

(Do Macs have AGP slots? If they do, why couldn't someone drop in any old video card that the rest of us use? Failing that, I know most of 'em do PCI, and you can still find video cards and capture cards that use PCI. I capture to Huffyuv-compressed AVI (720x480, 29.97 fps) with an All-In-Wonder Radeon. The video goes to MPEG only after all the ads are edited out.)

Re:USB? Ick.

[Denito]

my word, that's a lot of gadgets.

I'm glad there is slashdo.. Makes me feel like my gadget consuption is low by comparison.

Re:USB? Ick.

[cdrj]

What exactly is a Griffin iKnobbie thing? I tend to like useless and cool things, but I couldn't find what you were talking about.

Re:USB? Ick.

[Library Spoff]

i've not used one - but they do look cool on the website... (if I had a pound for every time i've said that - i'd be a fat bastard) http://www.griffintechnology.com/audio/pwrmate.htm l

Re:USB? Ick.

[Library Spoff]

err... that should be http://www.griffintechnology.com/audio/pwrmate.htm l sorry peeps

Re:USB? Ick.

[jht]

It's the Griffin PowerMate, but at the time I couldn't remember the name of it (and I'm at work, so it isn't in front of me).

I thought iKnobbiething was a good stand-in under the circumstances... In fact, maybe there's a market for a device with that kind of name!

Re:USB? Ick.

[Library Spoff]

jesus wept. talk about making a dick of yourself in public...

you aren't stupid. u can work it out...

Re:USB? Ick.

[Anonymous Coward]

So do you play a lot of Arkanoid with that thing?

Re:USB? Ick.

[Miska]

Formac has a firewire dv/tv-in (+ tuner) - too bad it's a bit more expensive and lacks PVR software

http://www.formac.co.uk/html/products/av/stud_1. ht m

.

Re:USB? Ick.

[greed]

Ooooh, got to get one of those for Tempest!

Re:USB? Ick.

[foobar104]

Of course the video would be compressed. By some standards, 8 Mbps MPEG-2 is broadcast quality (for SD, of course), so the 12 Mbps bandwidth of the USB connection is way overkill.

And as for DV, at 25 Mbps it's about five times the bandwidth that a consumer piece of gear should have to deal with. If it weren't 4:1:1*, it'd be better than DVD in a lot of ways.

An inexpensive consumer PVR really only needs to deal with MPEG-2, at bit rates around and below 4 Mbps. Anything more than that is too dang much.

* This notation refers to the number of samples taken from each color component channel. TV is expressed in the YUV color space, meaning one channel of luminance (a black-and-white signal, essentially) and two channels of color. It's not like RGB where each color is a primary hue, so don't bother trying to think of it that way. The very best way to sample is 4:4:4, or four samples per cycle of each channel. A good compromise is 4:2:2, or twice as many luminance samples as color samples. This maintains both good image resolution and good color resolution. DV samples at 4:1:1, which means the colors are ``squashed.'' Two shades that are close to one another on the uncompressed video will come out of the DV process as the same hue. So DV, despite its high bit rate, isn't quite good enough for broadcast work. At least, that's the prevailing opinion among the folks I work with.

Re:USB? Ick.

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

Macs do have AGP slots, but PC video cards and Mac video cards usually use different ROMs. There has been some luck flashing some cards with Mac ROMs, but the only recent video card that I have seen that is flashable is the ATI Radeon 8500(not the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500, unfortunately).

Re:USB? Ick.

[GregGardner]

I think for the design goal, MPEG-1 should be fine (it's just a cruddy NTSC signal, after all)

Do you watch TV on a no-name 13 inch TV with an over-the-air antenna that barely gets a good signal? Because if you have a decent TV and digital satellite or cable, NTSC video actually looks pretty good. Good enough that when I watch TV at other people's houses who have either bad/old TVs and/or analog/crappy cable, I almost can't stand it. And I'm not one of these "MP3's suck because I can hear what's missing" kind of audio/videophiles, just a normal schmoe.

If you see the difference on a good TV between MPEG-2 video (even just 480x480, SVCD quality) and VCD-quality MPEG-1 video, you wouldn't write off MPEG-2 video so quickly. It's worlds apart.

Re:USB? Ick.

[ozzimark]

Yeah, and most Creative Labs sound cards come with firewire built in, some video cards come with and external firewire pci card, such as Gainward's gf4 powerpack. Firewire is definitly here for PC's already, we just have to wait for motherboard manufacturing companies to add a port too...

Re:USB? Ick.

[jht]

I have a 27" set that's fed by my Tivo, and it's a pretty good set, though older. What we're looking at here, though, is a relatively inexpensive product designed for the casual user. IIRC, MPEG-2 encoding is fairly computationally expensive, and would require more horses in their box. That will bring up the cost. Sure, MPEG-2 is better, but MPEG-1 should be Good Enough.

A basic NTSC signal is a big steaming pile of $#!+, but the nicer sets nowadays can play all sorts of neat tricks to make the picture look pretty. You also have the advantage in a digital cable/satellite setup of virtually no static loss or noise in the picture. A good analog system isn't too bad, but not as nice (OTOH, analog signals don't give you the encoding artifacts that sometimes show up in MPEG streams).

MPEG-2 over Firewire would be ideal, but I don't think it'll be cheap enough to be a "what the hell" buy like this one could be.

Re:USB? Ick.

[Sir Joltalot]

A friend's dad just got one for HIS Mac, and loves it, rejoicing in being able to get rid of his TiVo ;)

Meh, I figure a TV tuner card, some well-placed cron jobs, a USB remote control and a bit of Perl glue could do a fine job. I think you can buy Linux compatible TV tuner cards for around $80. No hardware encoding, but most CPUs can handle realtime encoding these days.

Re:USB? Ick.

[hearingaid]

Actually, MPEG-1 video quality can be very good. You're right about USB though. If you had a dedicated USB channel just for the PVR, then it might be OK; but if you have that, then odds are you're a PowerMac user with a couple extra USB PCI cards, and you expect more.

However, I think it should be possible to do a FireWire PVR on a Mac with currently available hardware. See this post of mine.

Re:USB? Ick.

[mpe]

USB has more than enough bandwidth for a TV video and audio signal.

So long as this device is the only one on that USB interface.

Re:USB? Ick.

[MonkeyBoy]

Well, that, or a jog wheel. Or a volume knob. Or soft power-on and -off.

Actually, all of these, at the same time. The software can switch functionality depending on which application you have open.

Bye bye disk space

[MissMyNewton]

here I was, thinking I wouldn't fill up my new 160GB hard drive any time soon. Silly me.

Seeing as the disk drive industry is in some pain, they gotta be cheering stuff like this on! A 160GB drive ain't so tough when you stuff it with hours of [your favorite TV shows / movies] :-)

Apply Capture?

[nemui-chan]

How does this differ from any of the other hundreds of capture cards out there? Is it different just because its apple? (This isn't a troll... I'm seriously curious =) nems

Re:Apply Capture?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's small, white, and curvy?

It supports additional industry-standard buzzwords such as "digital hub" that PC solutions do not?

That's about all i can think of.

Re:Apply Capture?

[pudge]

Well, it is USB, so it is not a card, which means it will work with iMacs, iBooks, PowerBooks that don't have capability to use cards. Other than that, probably not too much different, though I don't know card specs. It mostly just captures the video, converts to MPEG-1, and is controllable via software to some extent (to change the channel or input source, for example), apparently. I sure want to play with one ...

USB? What were they thinking?

[guttentag]

it hooks up to one of the Mac's USB ports and captures MPEG-1 video... and here I was, thinking I wouldn't fill up my new 160GB hard drive any time soon. Silly me.

I have a USB TV Tuner (Eskape's MyTV, which produces abysmal video) that requires separate hardware for the audio because USB couldn't handle full-screen video plus audio. If the maker of this PVR is trying to squeeze video and audio into a USB (not USB 2) cable, I imagine the quality will be even worse.

This doesn't make any sense. If the Macintosh is really the target platform for this, why didn't they use Firewire? All current Macs ship with Firewire (even the $799 G3 iMac).

I can see the disclaimer on the Commerical now...

[motardo]

I remember on the iPod commercial at the end and in very small print (like any disclaimer) it said "Please don't steal music". I wonder what it'll say now, probably "Don't steal anything disney related or we will hunt you down and shove lilo and stitch related crap down your throats"

The problem with MPEG-1

[benwaggoner]

Alas, MPEG-1`is a lousy format for PVR use of any quality. MPEG-2 only stores video as progressive scan. However, TV is broadcast as interlaced, where the even lines are captured 1/59.94th of a second off from the odd lines. The difference between fields includes half of the video compression information.

Since MPEG-1 can't store data like this, one of the two fields will have to be discarded before capturing. This means you'll lose half of the temporal information automatically. This will leave anything originally shot of film looking jerky on playback, and anything shot on video less "present."

Good PVR systems use MPEG-2, which can store fields. There are good MPEG-2 hardware cards for Mac, even, that they could use instead. Heck, a Dual G4 can encode MPEG-2 in software in significantly faster than real time with the DVD Studio Pro Codec.

Re:The problem with MPEG-1

[Sc00ter]

It stores it as MPEG-1 so it's easy to burn to a VideoCD for storage and playback on my DVD players.

Re:The problem with MPEG-1

[foobar104]

Maybe this is an ignorant question, but why not just de-interlace the video before compressing it? De-interlacing NTSC-resolution video is a fairly trivial task in the digital realm, although I admit I would have no idea how to go about it with an analog signal.

vidcap card != PVR?

[zaren]

I can do video capture on my Mac in iMovie with a DV bridge, without even using a special video capture card; that doesn't make my Mac a PVR... does it?

Re:vidcap card != PVR?

[Space Coyote]

Set up a cron job to record the simpsons when you're not at home and you've got everything this does. (assuming you have a way of tuning a TV signal, of course)

Re:vidcap card != PVR?

[zaren]

cron jobs in OS9? :)

Yes, I know there's cron-type software out there... could probably write an applescript for it, too. But, I'm not running OS X on the box I'm doing the video stuff on, since it won't play nice with the SOnnet G4 upgrade.

Re:vidcap card != PVR?

[Strog]

What system are you running? Have you used Sonnet's OS X installer to go with their upgrades?

I've installed OS X on my stock 8600 (300Mhz 604e)and would be a little surprised if you couldn't make the G4 upgrade work. Of course there is often other issues out there.

Re:vidcap card != PVR?

[Tycho]

Do you have a beige G3 and a Sonnet G4 upgrade and are you having trouble before or after you install OS X? If you do, what ever you do don't use the Startup Disk control panel. To get my beige G3 with a Sonnet upgrade to boot from the install CD I had to press the "C" key after restarting it to install OS X. Don't reset the PRAM after this. To use OS 9 press the option key while restarting the computer. As I said before don't ever use the Startup Disk control panel or its for that matter its counterpart in OS X unless you want to set OS 9 to the default OS. If you do this to set the default OS back to OS X you will need to use the OS X install CD and monkey around with Open Firmware variables. That is beyond the scope of this post. Also to enable the cache in OS X, go to the Powerlogix website and download their Cache Control software which works with Sonnet upgades. The Sonnet OS X software is useless.

Two deceptions in the lead:

[Johnny Mnemonic]

This is not a rumor; this is an announced, real, for-sale-today product. www.elgato.com.

This will work with a Mac, but is not an Apple product. Just to be clear.

Re:Two deceptions in the lead:

[belloc]

This will work with a Mac, but is not an Apple product. Just to be clear.

I'm not sure the lead could have been any more clear on this point. It says right there that the product is "Made by El Gato Software" with a direct link to their homepage, on which the featured product is EyeTV. How exactly is that deceptive at all?

Not new at all

[CarrionBird]

A friend of mine has had a Dazzle USB for like 2 years. It's a nice little curvy box with composite + audio and s-video i/o and a usb connection. I dunno if it works on a Mac, but I dont see any reson why it wouldn't. (unless they were just bone-headed and didn't make drivers)

Newer models have DV connections & the USB product is now sold as the lower end (MPEG-1) solution.

Re:Not new at all

[zaren]

I believe they were bone-headed and didn't make drivers.

Not that it matters, because (as you said) Dazzle has a Firewire based DV bridge (the Hollywood model) that works great. Composite / s-video in and out, just like the usb, only running a much higher thruput with the Firewire. That's what I picked up, and it works great. I can patch it into my vcr and record live tv, too! See my previous comments about my Mac possibly being a PVR ;)

Not a Rumor

[robertchin]

Well, I hate to break it to you, but this is not a rumor. See: http://www.elgato.com/eyeTV/index.html for more details.

Re:Not a Rumor

[Asprin]

Well, I hate to break it to you, but this is not a rumor. See: http://www.elgato.com/eyeTV/index.html [elgato.com] for more details.

Ok, so if it's designed to be plugged into a Mac, why does it have a USB port instead of FireWire? Don't tell me Apple's given up already!

Re:Not a Rumor

[Splunge]

/. was just trying to get their press pass to MacWorld rescinded by claiming it's a rumor.

Re:Not a Rumor

[robertchin]

Well, it's not coming out of apple, it's from a third party. It's basically the same thing that has been out for several years on the PC (on the fly MPEG-1 converter, such as the one made by Dazzle), with the addition of scheduled recording and a TV guide. I don't think MPEG-1 requires that much bandwidth, Dazzle made a device that transferred data over the parallel port!

Re:USB? What were they thinking?

[ActMatrix]

USB is adequate for streaming MPEG-1 video & audio - most of those cheap USB TV tuners just send the raw video stream becuase they don't have hardware MPEG encoders.

Long Past That

[dthable]

I've gone past saying bye bye to disk space a long time ago. My MP3 collection alone takes up 160 GB (and all are legal...I have the CD's for any RIAA twit who wants to check). For this I'm going to need a whole new computer.

Re:Long Past That

[duren686]

Care to back up that claim? You would have to have ~1000* CDs in your posession.

This is assuming that the MP3s are at 320kbps and each CD has 74 minutes of audio, both of which are unrealistic assumptions.

Under realistic circumstances (160 kbps, each legitimate CD having an average of 60 minutes on audio) you would need 2276 CDs to fill 160GB with MP3 files.

Of course, you could just have 50 CDs and 20 copies of each song, but this doesn't seem like something you'd do.



*The actual calculated number is 922.5, and I can state the calculations that I made to prove this upon request.

Re:Long Past That

[dthable]

To the point, I have a lot of music. I don't really keep track of the exact number of CDs or the exact number of bytes I consume. So I guess and that's all I did.

For the disbelievers, I collect CDs. That means owning all of the imports, early CDs and some strange music that I can only find at small shops. I frequent Atomic Records and always on the hunt for new sounds. You didn't think it was 1000 Top 40 CDs?

Re:Long Past That

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, some people really do have that many CDs. I have over 200 myself, almost all bought while still a student (haven't bought a CD in quite some time). I could easily see someone with a good income having thousands...

Re:Long Past That

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I realise that now.. However having that much music is well beyond my wildest imagination.

And I figured it'd be an interesting calculation to do.

Re:Long Past That

[ozzimark]

Well, he could have mistyped, and meant flac, which is a loss-less compression, and is about 1/3 of the size of a .wav file. Assuming that each cd has 60 min of audio, umm wait, that would still be about 952.6 cd's to take up 160 gb... maybe they weren't converted into flac yet, so then it was only 317.5 cd's, which is still a pretty good number

The difference is...

[chris_martin]

That it works on Mac OS X. The PVR space is well covered on wintel, but there isn't anything out there on the Mac. There are tons of video capture cards/devices on the Mac, but nothing (until now) that does PVR with scheduling and such. Plus it does MPEG1 encoding in the box so it'll work on any Mac with USB. Sure, it's not the best by todays standards, but it's lightweight and works. Plus, it's less that $200US so it's a thrid the cost of a ReplayTV or TiVO. It's missing some features compaired to ReplayTV, but not enough to make me want to spend 3 times more for it. Plus, since it creates standard MPEG1 files, I can off load them to CD/HD/whatever and save them as long as I want.

Yet another....

[Anonymous Coward]

...Mac user touting a PC first as a reason to buy a Mac. We already have that. Just like we already had mp3 players, DVD burners, CDRWs, and just about everything you've ever had, first.

Nice try, though.

Double Plus 5 insightful

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I see slashdot content still self-moderates itself to about 33.33333% crap, while 99.9999% of the ads appearing on the site are for SourceForge. No one in their right mind would waste advertising dollars on a site that - by its own moderation system - contains over 1/3 crap that isn't worth reading.

Good job with the new 2-posts per day moderation system, Commander "Taco", if that really is your name.

Mod me down you censor-cowards, I don't care.

Re:Yes, yes yes but...

[MadAhab]

It will have a beowulf cluster of them. Can you imagine that?

None of these PC devices have nailed it

[bitmason]

The difference between a Tivo and all of the PC hardware/software combinations is like night and day. Tivo (usually) just works and fundamentally lets you break away from being tied to program schedules.

By contrast all the PC software that I've tried is still fundamentally based on pointing at a programming ggrid and asking the software to record something. That's when it works. I've had a lot of problems with, not only drivers, but also the software itself doing things like having problems recording adjacent programs -- to say nothing of crashing on a fairly regular basis.

I've come to believe that we'll move toward having a "digital entertainment center" that may be (hopefully will be) based on as open an architecture as possible but will be optimized for specific types of entertainment-related functions as opposed to general computing. We all like the idea of this infinitely hackable, totally open computer device, but -- at least for now -- I think Tivo has demonstrated rather convincingly that specialization has some advantages too.

Yawn!

[toupsie]

USB is not going to cut it for quality video and audio. Really isn't a PVR as much as it is a toy. I was excited, at first, when I heard rumors of the device but I was hoping for a Firewire device. I expect "ElGato" will have a bunch of these puppies sitting in pallets in their warehouse for a long time.

My major beef with Mac OS X right now is no TV-in card. I like to have CNN/CNBC/Fox News in a little window running while I type away at my work. With a three monitor Mac system, I have plenty of places to put that window. I have an ATI All-In-Wonder card that works beautifully in Mac OS 9 but has no drivers for Mac OS X and ATI doesn't give a damn if it ever does. It just runs one of the monitor like a plain RagePro 128. Which is fine, because I will never buy another card from ATI nor will my business until ATI provides TV-in/out drivers for the All-In-Wonder for Mac OS X. Unfair? Maybe so, but I am the customer, so I am always right. Nvidia is now my sole Mac Video Card supplier.

here's another cool device

[jilles]

http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_jbmm.htm l

It's a 20 GB mp3 player with support for firewire, usb 2.0. Drooling yet? Well it also has extension modules for turning it in a camcorder and a pvr and compact flash reader (to copy photos to the hd). Pretty cool price too :-). If it works as advertised, I might want one.

Cool

[Dilbert_]

I just hope it is compatible with European TV signals...

Re:Cool

[MatSimpsk]

From the FAQ on their website:

"Q. Does EyeTV support PAL format and work internationally?

A. Not yet. EyeTV currently only supports NTSC format for use in North America."

USB 2.0?

[Ramuh]

Perhaps they're using USB 2.0. If so, I still don't see why firewire wouldn't be a better choice.

Re:USB 2.0?

[Lysander Luddite]

Except no shipping Macs use USB 2.0. Maybe it will in the future, but not now.

Poor-Man's DVD Recorder

[Nomad7674]

Keep in mind that the selling point here is NOT just a PVR. If all you want is a PVR, it would be just as good to invest in a Tivo or ReplayTV unit which is dedicated and, as you say, provides higher-quality video. This is also a VCR replacement by providing a cheap way to both record programs in a PVR-style and then save them to a cheap disk-based media. With this unit and Toast, you can easily record your favorite Simpsons episodes, then burn then to a VCD for playing on your DVD player. It makes it sort of a poor-man's DVD recorder (since component DVD recorders are still in the $1000+ range).

This is why my brother is looking hard at buying an EyeTV. Course, he could also look for a solution with a DVD-burner built into it and a MPEG-2 encoder card, but that costs a lot more than the $200 he would be spending to add this to his exiting iMac + External DVD-burner setup.

Re:Poor-Man's DVD Recorder

[jayteedee]

Actually there is already a much superior solution on the Macs available (in terms of quality), but it is not a true PVR. There are two firewire boxes out there that take analog in and send it to the firewire port. One is Sony and I don't rememeber the other. These boxes basically act like a mini-DV player (without the tape recorder). You can also use a Canon ZR-40 and 45 camcorder (one of the few on the market with analog inputs) and run the firewire port straight into the mac. No need to go from analog in - to tape - and then transfer to Mac. Use iMovie to convert the captured file (mini-DV format) into MPEG 4 now (with the just released QT6). iMovie is trivial to use, but does take a significant amount of time, even on a high-end machine.

One fun thing I do is capture PC output to my Mac. I can run the PC through the Sony box and see the PC output on the Mac screen. Tickles me everytime I do it for some reason. A poor man's computer-TV tuner could be made by taking an old VCR and using it's internal tuner to feed the Sony analog inputs and watch TV on the Mac. Course, a poor man probably wouldn't own a Mac......

Re:Poor-Man's DVD Recorder

[johnstown]

It is the Hollywood DV-Bridge by Dazzle. It is about $270 at MacMall.

Re:Poor-Man's DVD Recorder

[gotih]

I think you're talking about the DV media converters from sony and dazzle. I have the dazzle and we have the sony at work. they both work great but the dazzle was about $100 less when i bought it.

it's a really cool product, IMHO -- it takes s-video or composite video from any source (vcr, tuner, camcorder...) and converts it to firewire which can then be encoded for whatever.

and, since it's an external firewire accessory, it works on linux, macs and windows.

Build a Linux PVR?

[superid]

I'm thinking of building a dedicated linux based PVR, but I know very little about video capture. All I want to do is timeshift broadcast TV. I know there are many capture cards, and when I read the specs I don't get a feel for what is the most important. I think that I'm moving towards a hauppauge winTV-pci because that is in my pricerange. However, I'm not sure that a P2-266 (my spare box) is up to the encoding challenge in a reasonable amount of time.

Can anyone point me to a very generic linux PVR project or page?

Thx!

(no, I don't want a TiVo)

Re:Build a Linux PVR?

[dwhittington]

http://www.cadsoft.de/people/kls/vdr/

Re:Build a Linux PVR?

[Derek Smalls]

http://gatos.sourceforge.net ref AVView

Re:Build a Linux PVR?

[Kris Thalamus]

http://davedina.apestaart.org/

Re:Build a Linux PVR?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://freevo.sourceforge.net/

Re:Build a Linux PVR?

[d2ksla]

You can check out my project: http://freevo.sourceforge.net.

Although for a 266 MHz computer you're probably looking at either buying some kind of HW-based encoder, or upgrading to a faster machine.

HELLO, ANYBODY THERE???

[Derek Smalls]

My TV burned up 4 years ago, and thanks to ATI. VirtualDub, and recently GATOS gatos.sourceforge.net I haven't seen a commercaial or an annoying network logo for YEARS. Maybe you just stuck with the CRAP software that ATI ships, I haven't. 5 mins of clipping, 15 mins of processing, and an annoying 60 minutes of TV turns into 40 mins of unfettered joy. And I get to keep it for those dull TV nights! Ted Turner can kiss my ass!

Re:HELLO, ANYBODY THERE???

[Izanagi]

Why do I envision a PVR with only one button?

Apple Home Entertainment System

[medcalf]

OK, so you take an iMac (or a G4 tower or even a PowerBook), hook up one of these gadgets as an input and a digital TV that takes a SVGA hookup as an output. Hook the audio out to the big speakers. All that's needed is a good AM/FM tuner card, and you could get rid of the entire audio component stack (other than the turntable) and the DVD player.

Re:Apple Home Entertainment System

[Anonymous Coward]

Hook the audio out to the big speakers. All that's needed is a good AM/FM tuner card, and you could get rid of the entire audio component stack (other than the turntable) and the DVD player.

And the receiver/amp... unless your Powerbook can drive 500-600 watts these days. Ummm, so what exactly are you getting rid of? The $100 VCR, a DVD player and replacing it with a $1800 iMac? I hope you have a better excuse when you try to explain that to your wife. No thanks, I'll keep my shit seperate so I can replace components as they become obsolete without throwing everything out and starting from scratch.

Re:Apple Home Entertainment System

[SpookyFish]

Umm, no. The audio path quality won't come close to even low-end stereo components. Further, you say: "Hook the audio out to the big speakers" -- that's going to take an amplifier..

Worst of all, this "gadget" uses MPEG-1, 320x240 resolution -- fine quality for a small window, but nothing you are going to want to watch on a TV larger than 13".

---
Don't mess with Texas!

Re:Apple Home Entertainment System

[medcalf]

As it happens, I do have a better justification. Obviously, the components are not all there yet (this gadget, for example, is not really high quality), but it will be nice to get to the point where I can have TiVo-like features for both TV and radio, and can both output to the screen/speakers and burn CDs/DVDs if I choose to take with me on the road. The thing is, in maybe five years all of the hardware and software should be around to do exactly that. Digital hub yumminess. This is not a solution, but it is a step towards a solution, to the problem of media management in general.

What would be best from my point of view would be a PVR with an OPEN STANDARD guide format (so that competition could arise, and prices would go down as would fear of the provider company collapsing and leaving you with a really expensive VCR), which also had an AM/FM tuner and the appropriate outputs, and also had a combo CD/CD-R/DVD/DVD-R drive. The idea is to get all of the audio and video into a device that can burn copies (including mixes and edits) for you to take on the road, can store gobs of shows/CDs, and can find things that you like with only minimal intervention from you. (When someone invents a radio tuner that can seek out and find the new Rush song for me, then automatically record it, I'll buy it!)

Re:Apple Home Entertainment System

[Pope]

Well, I gotta disagree with you there. If MPEG-1 was so horrible, why the huge interest (mainly on the x86 side of the continuum) in VCDs?

Re:Apple Home Entertainment System

[Anonymous Coward]

and it will cost 5 times more too! yippee!

Advertisements

[sdjunky]

I can see them now
www.apple.com/tivo/switch

"Bob Gangreene - I used to own a Tivo. I felt so boxed in. It's like I had no choices. Also, all of my actions were being recorded and sold. But now I have Apple's new PVR and I'll never go back"

"Janice Manson - PVR? What's that? Oh, you mean my personal recorder. It's so easy to use I don't even know what it's called"

"Hillary Rosen - This is off the record right? Well, personally I love this thing. And since it's from Apple we definitely have an easier time of chopping their little company into pieces over copyright issues. Just between you and me MS really looking into supporting the RIAA if we plan on going that route. All I can say is that Mac users are THIEVES"

what about the quality?

[brad3378]

I haven't researched it, but I don't think USB 1.0 will support the bandwidth for really good quality video.

To this day, I've never seen a good USB 1.0 TV tuner
and I think thats the reason.

Re:what about the quality?

[uradu]

VCD data rates are around 1150 Kbps, and since this device most likely compresses the video on the fly on-board and uploads it to the computer, there's theoretically plenty of bandwidth in the 12 Mbps spec of USB 1.1, even allowing for lots of overhead and other data streams.

USB = plenty of bandwidth for compressed data

[Fencepost]

As someone else has also pointed out, running uncompressed video over USB is a problem, but if you have a box that's doing hardware compression and just sending the compressed file over USB for storage then you shouldn't have any problems.

The review mentions that the standard (only?) compression results in about 650MB of data for each hour of recording. Basing an estimate of USB bulk data transfer capacity on the fact that you can get 4x USB CDR drives, this thing is only using approximately 1/4 of the capacity of a USB connection.

Re:USB = plenty of bandwidth for compressed data

[Chasing Amy]

USB isn't Firewire though--sharing USB's processor overhead and low bandwidth between devices will quickly cause problems when you're dealing with something as chunky as a video signal over USB. Since Macs use so much crap over USB, this is a recipe for disaster--imagine if you're trying to save the video stream to a USB drive while listening to the audio on your USB speakers and using your USB mouse and keyboard which are next to your USB CD-RW, etc.--not good. Even if you're saving to the internal drive or a Firewire drive, that still leaves a lot of devices sharing the USB ports--even though some are low-bandwidth low-overhead like your keyboard and mouse, that video signal needs as much bandwidth as you can get.

Sorry, but internal AGP All-in-Wonder cards will always be the best PVRs--you can encode FULL NTSC or PAL resolution into MPEG-2 or anything else, not just lowly 320x240 or thereabouts MPEG-1. And as processors become more powerful, realtime MPEG-4 encoding of full-quality signals will become an option for such cards. But never for lowly USB devices.

save your money and get a 7500/7600

[smagoun]

I have a Powermac 7600, which shipped with built-in RCA audio + video inputs, as well as an S-Video input. The video quality is excellent (for a consumer device), and it does full-screen (640x480) playback without any of the ugliness I've seen from most USB capture devices. Granted, this new doodad seems to do MPEG-1 encoding on the device, but I'll take a raw stream over MPEG any day.

So that's the video input part, on a machine that's 6+ years old. The Tivo part can be done with a bit of script magic (Applescript, perl, whatever) or tools like BTV from bensoftware. You can encode to MPEG/cinepak/whatever on the fly, or later on. If you don't need the Tivo part, Apple's software does a good job of recording things.

Total cost is about $50 these days, and I'll bet the quality is better.

Re:save your money and get a 7500/7600

[jeffehobbs]

Total cost is about $50 these days

The only problem with that scenario is that the 7500/7600 had only SCSI on the motherboard, so you'd probably also want/need to slap an IDE card in there so you could use large cheap IDE drives -- and that factor runs up the cost appreciably.

~jeff

Re:save your money and get a 7500/7600

[BlowChunx]

Some of the beige G3's shipped with the same "personality" card. They also had on board IDE...

Re:save your money and get a 7500/7600

[Pope]

It sure as hell doesn't do 640x480 capturing which is what most folks would be interested in.

Re:save your money and get a 7500/7600

[type40]

that just what I've done, I hooked my VCR up to my 7500 when I move a few months ago and I gave to tv to a friend.
Right now I've go my VCR. my turn table, and my Play Station hooked up the inputs. I've got my Aiwa (cheep but works for me) hook up as the speakers.

Re:save your money and get a 7500/7600

[SmittyTheBold]

The 7600 may be capable of realtiem capture, but not at 640x480, and certainly not while simultaneously decoding a similar stream.

That's part of the magic a TiVo does...it has a built-in MPEG2 hardware codec, so the 50 MHz PPC (in series 1) or 200 MHz MIPS (series 2) can focus on the UI and doing all the *other* stuff a TiVo does.

Also, don't discount the "scripting" work the TiVo folks have done. The system is simply *amazing* on a technical level. For example, know what happens if you take out the drive and zero it out? The next time you power up the unit, the ROM takes over, dials in to the service, and re-downloads the entire OS. It then re-installs as necessary. After some simple configuration, you are back to your previous state. The ability of a TiVo to repair itself is only one of the rather impressive features.

It also has best-of-breed conflict management, automatic updates to teh recording schedule, and a simple but powerful UI.

Now, I'm nto saying that sort of thing isn't possible with another system. In fact, the TiVo is a very customized Linux system. It's proof that it's possible...but much like an office suite or web browser, it's not the kind of open-source project that a person can tackle on his own.

Isn't it a shame then

[Anonymous Coward]

that all those wonderful parts are strung together with the pos operating systems the PC seems to be stuck with.

Re:Isn't it a shame then

[Anonymous Coward]

what linux?!?!?
bwahahahaa

Satellite input?

[sethdelackner]

What I really want is a PVR that includes satellite (Dish and DirecTV) tuners without being tied to a particular provider's service and pro-advertising whims.

Re:Satellite input?

[/dev/trash]

What I really want is a PVR that includes satellite (Dish and DirecTV) tuners without being tied to a particular provider's service and pro-advertising whims.

Don't worry once the DISH and DirecTV merger goes thru your wish will be granted.

Re:Satellite input?

[sethdelackner]

If I have to accept even less competition in an already stagnant market (two satellite companies with nearly identical plans and completely incompatible equipment, one cable company in each market with ridiculous pricing) all just to be able to buy a Satellite-ready PVR, I'd rather just keep my VCR. At least my Dish receiver can automatically activate the VCR to record programs.

Anything you can do...

[RedX]

In the never ending MS vs. Apple game of "Dueling Banjos", this sounds similar to Microsoft's "Freestyle" version of XP (aka XP Media Center). Without violating an NDA, I will say that Freestyle is a pretty slick product but doesn't compare to my TiVo. It did finally give me an easy way to play MP3 in the living room though, something I've been too lazy to put together myself. The hardware specs include MPEG-2 encoding card, TV-out connection, firewire, USB, DVD-ROM, CDRW, remote control. It's certainly nothing one of us couldn't do with any PC though.

Re:Anything you can do...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also see http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/freestyle_pre view.asp

Apple Created? No

[zaffir]

Remember, this isn't an Apple product - it's just an OS X-compatible PVR device. Nothing to see here, folks, move along...

USB? Why not FireWire?

[Anonymous Coward]

Brilliant: A potentially cool device with a poor USB connection.

quicktime broadcaster?

[jeffehobbs]

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/broadcaste r/

QuickTime Broadcaster not only encodes video in real-time to MPEG-4 over a network, but will also save a file to disk as well. And the app is AppleScriptable! -- so the only problem now is getting the video (tuned to the appropriate channel) into the machine at the right time. Too bad there's no cheap PCI TV tuners for the Mac...

I've got to think that this approach -- and the El Gato "PVR" for that matter -- is vastly inferior to a "set-it-and-forget-it" tivo.

~jeff

Re:quicktime broadcaster?

[Space Coyote]

Too bad there's no cheap PCI TV tuners for the Mac...

Speaking of which, how hard would it be to port some of the video4linux code over to Darwin/BSD anyway? Seems like a weekend job for someone who knows a little about how Darwin works..

Isn't this a job for Apple itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if Apple shouldn't take the job of providing means for a tv tuner and tivo-like functionalities right inside macs. It would cost nothing in terms of hardware to provide that (the actual tv/fm tuner and pci encoder costs less than $50), and with a decent 'iTv' software, things like the new iMac could be what it's advertised for, a complete multimedia station.

If that could be the reality, i would buy a 17' or 21' iMac (when it gets available) and use it as a desktop [lamp], tv, radio, cd/dvd player, etc.

Looks Like a Great Product

[Spencerian]

I've had an old ixMICRO TV tuner card in my B/W G3 for a couple of years. Works well, but has a slight problem in that the company that made it went belly up, and there is no Mac OS X software for it.

Since then, there were next to ZERO Macintosh TV tuners out there for Mac OS X use. ATI appears to have one, but its feature set is limited. Eskape Labs has been working on its MyTV OS X software for over a year now, and was in the running for my money until EyeTV showed up.

A USB TV tuner is a good fit. It doesn't suck up a precious PCI slot. It can be moved to any computer with cable hookup and USB. Works great with older or laptop Macs. Fits everyone I need for my new home.

The PTR features are a bonus, but will be very much appreciated. The price can't be beat, either. Competitive products will cost up to $1000 since they have internal hard drives. EyeTV appears to balance the abilities of the Mac with the features of a basic PTR.

The RCA video inputs also allow you to use the computer as a quickie display for today's game consoles such as PlayStation, or a basic video input for your camera.

Not a bad price at $199 (during Macworld, only $179), and the product quality looks good. While FireWire may seem a logical choice, it's overkill--USB has more than enough bandwidth. The only thing you need is to keep some drive space clear.

Biggest flaw - No TV out ports!

[jjh37997]

The biggest problem with the EyeTV is not its choice of USB over Firewire but its lack of RCA/S-Video outputs. I don't want to watch TV on my computer!

From what I've heard the software is top notch, free TV guide, ability to pause live TV, etc... but its useless unless you like to watch all of your shows in a tiny window on your computer's screen.

Re:Biggest flaw - No TV out ports!

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, Doesn't your mac have an S-video output? Mine does.

No Repeating Recordings? (i.e., TiVo Season Pass)

[Anonymous Coward]

There seems to be no mention of repeating a recording. That is, it seems you have to program this like an ordinary VCR. Once per program recording. If this is the case, this is far from a TiVo like DVR. Is this feature present? Their crappy grid-like interface and silence on this issue in their FAQ might suggest a lack of this important feature. Anyone know?

Beyond the lame MPEG-1/USB issues, the UI and lack of critical Repeating Recordings makes this a dud (assuming it is missing that is).

Just Like GeoPort or WinPrinters

[JoeCommodore]

Yep, there goes your computeter disk space and processing time in support for another device with cut-rate hardware features.

IF it was something that hooked to an iPod, THEN you would have a hot product, as you don't need to have the computer on and running a task to intercept those shows, added portability, etc. etc. etc.

Re:Exciting? Hardly!

[lostchicken]

Go here and turn off Apple news if you don't want to see it.

/. has options. If you don't like the defaults, don't use them...

Any chance of a Macworld Blackout?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, is there any chance that /. could implement a voluntary blackout of all Apple-related rumors? Heck, you could even turn it into a subscriber feature, where you leave the stories in the submission bins until after the keynote addresses, since subscribers have access to the bins (I think).

Re:No Repeating Recordings? (i.e., TiVo Season Pas

[pudge]

If you had read the links, you'd know that this box uses an external service, titanTV, for scheduling. SO perhaps you could check out titanTV for more information about what can be done.

Re:Exciting? Hardly!

[Anonymous Coward]

This Slashdot thread is yet another example of how Mac-centric the "new" Slashdot has become.

Oh my god, he's right! Slashdot is now Macdot!11!!! Two front page articles in two days! The plastic...it's everywhere!!!

Get a grip.

Yet another reason to lick my balls.

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t.

Not from Apple

[nullard]

Well, personally I love this thing. And since it's from Apple ...

This might be funny if it was an Apple product. In reality, it's just a PVR peripheral targeting the Mac market.

Re:Not from Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

It still wouldn't be funny.

and if one doesn't have an AGP slot�

[Miska]

there's this exellent external firewire tv/dv-in + tuner device from Formac

http://www.formac.co.uk/html/products/av/stud_1. ht m

(too bad it costs more than a small tv)

.

More information

[ruiner13]

There is some information lacking in people's comment's i've noticed. First of all, the lower quality setting is compatible with Toast VCD, as it captures at 320 x 240 resolution. This stores about an hour of video on one CD. The unit also has a higher quality setting which they say is "double" the resoultion of the regular video. I assume they mean 640 x 480, which is really 4x resolution, but we'll see. From what i've seen on screen captures of the quality, looks pretty decent. And this unit is different than a regular capture card because it has a cable ready coaxial connector, not just composite and s-video (although it has those too). So, whereas with a standard vid cap card, you'd ned a vcr to tune the stations, this one just hooks up to the wall jack. Seems like a pretty good solution to me!

I got most of my info from this link: http://www.macintoshdigitalhub.com/reviews/eyetv/i ndex.html. Hope this helps clear stuff up!

Um...hello...USB SUCKS!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

How are people going to like it when the device "disappears" in the middle of a show? What happens if they try to print something while recording? Transfer data to a USB storage device? Scan an image? USB(1.x) cannot handle real-time things like CDRW and video capture. It simply isn't reliable enough or fast enough.

I could have sworn that new Macs have interfaces that are much more appropriate. PCI, firewire, etc.

Deinterlacing?

[Andy Dodd]

Might it be possible that the h/w is performing some sort of basic deinterlacing to get around this?

That said, MPEG-2 would be the best approach.

Or even better, if someone released Bt8x8 drivers for OS X - Then you'd be able to use one of the many PCI tuner cards which give FAR better performance at a lower price.

Shouldn't be that hard... Just a matter of someone porting the BTTV drivers...

Not necessary

[uradu]

Use an existing (cheap) sat tuner and use the composite out. Then you connect a COM port to the data port on the sat tuner, leaving you with just one problem: software support for tuning via the COM port. Maybe they'll include that later in a software update, who knows. That's what the TiVo does anyway.

According to another press release from Gato:

[RyanFenton]

"
My Name is El Gato.
I Have Metal Ends.
Switch me on.
And save 15 minutes of Friends.
"

The joke just had to be made. :^)

Ryan Fenton

Re:According to another press release from Gato:

[entrox]

Going off-topic, but MAN that game rocked .. still my favorite RPG ;-D

Will everyone please STFU about USB already?

[billybob]

Why not include firewire? Hmm, let's see. Oh, that's right, because there's ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING POINT.

USB cant handle this bandwith? Did you know that 1+1=2? Do any of you linux fucks know how to read? IT COMPRESSES THE GOD DAMN DATA BEFORE IT SENDS IT TO THE MAC! WOW, IMAGINE THAT! The website says about 650 megs per hour. That's 10 megs per minute. Thats one meg every six seconds. You think USB can't handle that? Christ. I hate all of you.

Yah, firewire would definitely be a requirement if this thing had a hard drive and stored the video there, and then you had to transfer it to a mac to burn it. But guess what? That's not how it works! It compresses and sends it to the mac AS YOURE RECORDING! WOW IMAGINE THAT!

What's it matter anyways, none of you linux fucks own a mac. So you can all blow my fully erect cock. Fuckers.

But obviously you didn't...

[Anonymous Coward]

...because you know that Apple is responsible for well more than 5% of the innovation that is ultimately part of the mainstream computer users experience... so why ignore the discussions?!? i find them quite interesting.

There is a better pvr already out.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.formac.com/html/shopformac.html?cid=sho p_products_studio

Re:There is a better pvr already out.

[mmmmark]

Better, yes. Also MUCH more expensive!

Re:Exciting? Hardly!

[kylef]

I'm apologize, but the announcement of a standard peripheral is simply not very newsworthy; that is the ONLY point that I was trying to make.

I'm so sorry if I offended your high opinion of this forum.

I Like!!!

[theolein]

No DRM, no Microsoft! What could be nicer? Now when will the PAL version be coming?

Sitting in front of my computer all day?

[owlicks58]

Am I the only one that doesn't want to sit in front of my computer to watch tv? If this had an s-video output to my tv so I could display my monitor on my TV I would be all over that. Unfortunately I spend enough time in front of my computer already, I want to be able to relax on my bed when I watch TV

Who needs a HD?

[Gorbie]

With the new harddrives coming out at such large sizes combined with the Superdrive available in the G$ towers, who needs it. Record all week to your HD. Take a couple of hours and write it to DVD. Repeat.

the sat channel problem

[saabmp3]

As somebody mentioned before, there is a big problem with this unit. It can't change channels on a sat or digital cable box! This is the one reason why I wouldn't get one as I need something to replce my ReplayTV box (RIP mobo from replayTV). All it needs is a external IR extenter to change channels on the sat or cable box, and that shouldn't be too hard to implement. Saab

xtv

[beerits]

Or even better, if someone released Bt8x8 drivers for OS X - Then you'd be able to use one of the many PCI tuner cards which give FAR better performance at a lower price.
xtv is the project you are looking for.

No AppleScripting means No Voice Control

[EverlastingPhelps]

I've looked at the PDF manual for this thing, and I couldn't find anything about it being AppleScriptable. When I saw this thing, I immediately thought, "Hook this thing into Speakable Items and you have a voice controlled PVR!" but it looks like that is going to at least have to wait for an upgrade.

Of course, I could imagine what it is like sometimes if you start arguing about what program to watch with your SO...

Video I/O is Unusual on Macs?

[rakslice]

Isn't there good third party PVR software for Mac? There's a fair amount of PVR software for Windows, and presumably there are a comparable number of Macheads wanting PVR capabilities on the cheap; although perhaps Mac folk would have a strong preference for the polished all-in-one-product-ness of Tivo-type systems despite the expense and lack of digital video access.

And, another obstacle: Apple doesn't sell systems with built-in video I/O anymore. I find this kind of strange, given their kitchen sink attitude towards feature integration, and their historically good pre-G3 PowerMac AV models. Their adoption of standard PCI and AGP slots on the bigger boxen should make this a non-issue. However, many companies market PCI/AGP hardware separately for Mac and PC, sometimes even to the point of selling similar but incompatible (and sometimes feature-reduced, e.g. Apple TV tuners) products on the Mac side. Anyone know why that is? It doesn't make any sense to me.

Re:I can see the disclaimer on the Commerical now.

[MaxVlast]

Why?

Only does parts of what Tivo does

[Gorimek]

This only does part of what a real PVR does. Half the attraction of a Tivo is how you can pause and rewind live TV, which it is always recording 24/7. Also it searches the programming constantly to bring you your favorite shows where- and whenever it shows.

Not that there is anything wrong with a product that only does one thing, but people should understand what it is and is not.

Re:Only does parts of what Tivo does

[IOdine]

>This only does part of what a real PVR does.
>Half the attraction of a Tivo is how you can
>pause and rewind live TV, which it is always
>recording 24/7.

This is the part I am most curious about.
Does anyone know an open source project
that does just this?

How to make a link

[Paradise Pete]

How to make a link:

type this:
<a href = http://www.slashdot.org> Descriptive Text Goes Here</a>

Which makes a link that looks like this:
Descriptive Text Goes Here

There's another product in development.

[BitGeek]

This product will be released this fall. I know because I'm one of the people working on it.

It's features:

-- Designed as a TiVO replacement-- you watch tv on TV, not on your computer (as you do with eyeTV)
-- The shows are quicktime movies that you can backup as you wish (CD if you want, or use iDVD and turn them into DVDs)
-- Firewire based
-- Can record at "broadcast quality" DV if you want really high quality copies of your shows.
-- Records at high quality in MPEG4 to give you better quality at a better compression ratio than TiVo. Imagine a 500 hour capacity.
-- MacOSX based. You use whatever hard drives you want (Firewire or internal) to store as much as you wish.
-- Software supports a variety of hardware devices, and isn't tied to any specific capture device.
-- NTSC only initially.
-- Built in program guide and speculative recording (like Tivo) as well.

Will be sold as a software product to pair with your choice of hardware, but complete systems will be availible as well.

Better quality than TiVo, at lower cost per hour and without a subscription fee.

When we make our formal "its shipping" announcement, I'll submit it to /. but just wanted anyone who wants a Firewire/high quality PVR to know there's one coming for the Mac. Also, please let me know if you have another format you want supported than MPEG4 and DV. We want to make the product very easy to use (figuring most consumers won't know the difference between DV and MPEG4) but have the flexibility for power users as well.

Re:There's another product in development.

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention that this wonder product is *half* the cost of the EyeTV in your FUD.

Do you work for M$?

Snapstream's doing much the same for PC/PocketPC

[Anonymous Coward]

Snapstream's product is software based, so this may be better, but I understand they're coming out with some hardware fairly soon.

http://snapstream.com/

Hauppage

[sPaKr]

I got a Hauppauge winTV-PVR. It has a hardware mpeg encoder that has a crap load of modes (CBR,VBR, 1- 20 Mb/s bit rates.) even does vcd and burning in windows. Best of all the card uses a BT chipset.. so its supported in Linux and FreeBSD. I see alot of negative stuff about the ATI usb TV tuners so lets not get our hopes up about MAC stuff. Apple Mac hardware usally rocks.. but rarley do I find 3rd party stuff any where near the same quality.

XClaim VR Too

[Slur]

I got an XClaim VR (Rage 128) when ATI was closing them out, and I got an external TV Tuner with it. As you mention, it works under 9 but the Mac OS X drivers don't recognize the TV Tuner. Too bad, because if ATI had offered some decent Mac OS X software to support this tuner I'd certainly buy it. Heck, they could simply give specs to the creator of BTV and he'd be happy to do it.

This is always the strongest argument for OSS for me: When hardware makers stop supporting their hardware. I've got a nice little pile of perfectly good hardware that simply needs driver support. Everytime I look at my pile I'm reminded which vendors don't support me - and I avoid supporting them right back.

By the way, USB has enough bandwidth for MPEG-1 compressed video. According to the specs I've read, an hour of the smaller video size takes up about 650MB. That's about 185K bytes per second which USB can easily handle.

WRONG WRONG, no, and WRONG.

[Chasing Amy]

> Of course the video would be compressed.

That's the problem you just don't seem to understand. It has to be compressed BEFORE it goes over the USB bus, meaning it has to be done either by cheap low-quality hardware or expensive broadcast-quality hardware. Guess which kind comes on sub-$500 dongles like this POS? So, the video will be poorly compressed and low-quality. What good is that supposedly superior PPC processor if it doesn't even get to do all the compression, and instead gets a stream pre-compressed by a cheap lossy EyeTV chipset?

Contrast that to the AGP All-in-Wonder solutions and the many PCI solutions for the PC, which have ten to fifty times more bandwidth and can let the CPU handle most of the encoding duties to produce high-quality realtime MPEG-2 or other captures at full NTSC or PAL resolution, not comparatively crappy 320x240 or so MPEG-1.

Seriously, go rad the ArsTechnica A/V Club FAQ and forum before you spout this ill-educated nonsense. Better yet, go mention it on the AVSforum website, this idea that crappy MPEG-1 over USB is going to rival a real encoding card. Bah.

Re:WRONG WRONG, no, and WRONG.

[foobar104]

First of all, you're being kind of an asshole. There's no need at all to use phrases like ``ill-educated nonsense,'' particularly when you know that's not the case.

But what's worse, you didn't even understand my post. The assertion was made that USB isn't good enough for a video device. I refuted that idea, completely. SD at 8 Mbps MPEG-2, MP@ML, is considered (by most) to be broadcast quality. USB's bandwidth is 12 Mbps. QED.

As for the device in question, I have no opinion at all. Never seen it, don't know. That said, I've never seen a software MPEG-2 encoder that could work in real time, so I can't really have an opinion about those, either.

If you want to throw more bits at the problem, go right ahead. It's your money. Hell, if you can find a way to get SDI to your house, you can store 270 Mbps of raw data, if you want. But don't take an extreme position and then argue that everybody else's position sucks. That's just annoying.

You know what I think? I think *all* compressed video kinda sucks. I don't enjoy watching sports in OTA HD as much as I wish I could because I can see the compression artifacts. Dealing with uncompressed HD on an Inferno all day makes it hard to come home and watch HDNET at 15 Mbps. But just take a deep breath and repeat after me: It's just television. It doesn't matter.

Re:WRONG WRONG, no, and WRONG.

[Chasing Amy]

> First of all, you're being kind of an asshole.

Sorry if I was, but I see so many ill-educated posts here that could be cured by a quick trip to the ArsTechnica A/V FAQ or the AVS Forum that it's quite annoying. These issues of USB-based video capture devices have already been discussed ad nauseam and demonstrated conclusively. This has even been pointed out on Slashdot before. Yet for some reason, a large number of Slashdot's newer Mac users are completely ignorant of such issues and discussions.

> SD at 8 Mbps MPEG-2, MP@ML, is considered (by most) to be broadcast
> quality. USB's bandwidth is 12 Mbps. QED.

Not QED, because to compress it *before* it gets sent over the USB bus into a quality MPEG-2 stream would take *expensive* professional-quality encoding equipment. That's not what EyeTV is; it's yet another consumer USB MPEG-1 encoder so by definition its picture will be rather poor. There are already comparable devices for both the PC and Mac, such as the ATI TV-Wonder USB, and such devices are roundly panned as low-quality, with noisy pictures and bad artifacting and too-low bitrates. PCI and AGP solutions are worlds better. Here's a quick primer on some of them, with the ATI All-in-Wonder line being pretty clear winners:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1609

> I've never seen a software MPEG-2 encoder that could work in real time,
> so I can't really have an opinion about those, either.

That's what devices like the ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 and similar can do when paired with a fast processor. Powerful CPUs are cheap these days--may as well put them to use more intensive than word-processing. Depending on the settings, picture quality can be quite impressive.

These issues I've witnessed first-hand because I not only use an older PCI-based capture card, I've also taken to downloading many of the TV shows I watch regularly and would probably want to keep a day or two after they've been aired from USENET, rather than having to watch them at a particular time. That's exposed me to a lot of different captures with the whole spectrum of equipment. Depending on the equipment and capture methods and quality of the source some captures look *almost* DVD-quality, while others look (and sound) horrible. People often list their equipment in the readme files for their posts, and the equipment that provides the worst-quality video is USB. It just isn't suitable for such devices, at least not until a truly cheap broadcast-quality MPEG-2 encoder chipset is invented for them. Even so, remember that USB's top throughput listing is a *burst* speed, unlike Firewire's, and that the bus will be shared between any other USB peripherals connected. This just makes the USB bus a risky method of realtime A/V data collection, particularly on Macs where USB speakers and hard drives and CD devices are so common. As Apple themselves point out, USB is for low-bandwidth peripherals like keyboards and mice and webcams and the occasional digital camera or such. Firewire is much better for more intensive uses.

> But don't take an extreme position and then argue that everybody else's
> position sucks.

It's not an extreme position in the least. Go to sites populated with people who use consumer capture technology, and there's about 90% agreement with my position. Start by going to the ArsTechnica.com forums' "A/V Club" and reading their FAQ if you disbelieve what I'm saying. My position is mainstream in the community which buys most of the consumer video capture devices.

Re:WRONG WRONG, no, and WRONG.

[foobar104]

So... after I tried to explain, without ambiguity, that I have nothing to say about the EyeTV thingy specifically, you decided to just hop up and down on the same point again? That's no fun.

Let me just put the last nail in this particular coffin. I don't know everything, but I work with broadcast video every day, so I have some working knowledge at least. We're talking about the width of the pipe, here, and that's all. I have seen a USB hard drive sustain reads of about 900 KB per second for an hour, so it's clear that USB is capable, in the most literal sense, of sustaining transfers in excess of 10 Mbps. Since you can squeeze an awful lot of broadcast-quality video into 10 Mbps, USB is therefore not inherently unsuited to compressed video transport.

You seem to be arguing-- for reasons that baffle me-- that the fact that the video must be compressed outside the computer sucks and that only internal, software-based compression is okay. Based on the rack of SD and HD MPEG-2 encoding gear in my lab at the office, I'd have to call ``bullshit'' on that assertion. As I've said before, I have never seen a professional application of a software-based real-time MPEG-2 encoder, so I can't really form an opinion. But they're conspicuous by their absence, I think.

I mean, let's put this in perspective. There are two kinds of compressed video: broadcast quality, and horseshit. On that scale, everything I've ever seen south of a Minerva VNP is horseshit, and that includes both USB encoders and consumer PCI cards.

You find the variety of horseshit compressed video you can squeeze out of your PC to be acceptable, but you find the kind you can get out of the EyeTV widget to be unacceptable. That's a valid opinion, and I respect it. But don't let that develop into a superiority complex. It's still horseshit.

Re:WRONG WRONG, no, and WRONG.

[Chasing Amy]

> Based on the rack of SD and HD MPEG-2 encoding gear in my lab

Again, this is my point, and this is why you're so heartily mistaken. That is expensive non-consumer-level equipment that you're discussing. Consumer-level equipment *cannot* compress into a good-quality MPEG-2 stream, period, and without any extant exception. "Real" PVRs can do so because TiVos and such are produced on a much larger scale than PC or Mac based USB devices and have economies of scale to reduce component costs; PC and Mac USB devices do not. And no, I was not talking only of the EyeTV device specifically, but of *every* consumer USB-based video capture device yet devised--and there are many. Go research them. All are inadequate.

> But don't let that develop into a superiority complex.

It's not a superiority complex. It's simple observation from personal experience. Well-made MPEG-2 captures with good equipment from a quality source such as a high-quality satellite broadcast can almost rival DVD quality. MPEG-1 from a USB device cannot. You may work in broadcasting, but you're talking out of your ass about a market segment of which you are ignorant. Go advise broadcast houses on what to purchase, but don't presume to say that because the peak bandwidth of unshared USB is high enough to accomodate a broadcast quality stream has *anything* to do with whether consumer USB video capture devices (not this one in particular, ALL of them) could produce a decent picture. They can't, period, and I've provided links earlier explaining why.

Re:WRONG WRONG, no, and WRONG.

[ncc74656]

The assertion was made that USB isn't good enough for a video device. I refuted that idea, completely. SD at 8 Mbps MPEG-2, MP@ML, is considered (by most) to be broadcast quality. USB's bandwidth is 12 Mbps. QED.

...and do you believe that those lightweight speakers down at the computer shop for $10 really deliver 80 watts per channel? As soon as your computer has even the slightest brain fart, you're going to lose some of what the USB dongle is spitting out. I'm not sure I'd trust it to get through a one- or two-hour video capture, unless you're content to do absolutely nothing else with the computer while it's running and you're sure there are no background processes that could interfere. USB wasn't designed with this kind of use in mind. It's like sticking a scanner on a parallel port. You can do that, but is it really the best way to get the job done?

As for the device in question, I have no opinion at all. Never seen it, don't know. That said, I've never seen a software MPEG-2 encoder that could work in real time, so I can't really have an opinion about those, either.

The software that comes with the All-In-Wonder Radeon does on-the-fly MPEG-2 encoding at up to 720x480. I usually capture to AVI with Huffyuv compression, though. I cut the ads out before burning to SVCD, so the fewer times a lossy compression method like MPEG is applied to the video, the better.

Re:WRONG WRONG, no, and WRONG.

[foobar104]

Again, you're arguing a point that I haven't said anything about. We're talking past each other. If you want the last word on the subject, have at it. I can't see any benefit coming from discussing this further.

Confusion

[bryan1945]

Ok people, Apple releases the iPod with only Firewire, but will release a PVR with only USB? Stop the crack smokin! If this is even remotely true, Apple will put in monster interfaces, not some crippled interface.

Just stop and think about it for a minute or 2, most of the complaints kinda vanish after rational thought.

PowerMacs have AGP slots.

[hearingaid]

And they've had PCI for quite a long time now as well.

iMacs, of course, lack slots (except for RAM and AirPort), although the built-in video cards have been AGP-based in them for several years now.