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Mac PVR Coming Soon

Posted by pudge on from the must-get-new-toy dept.

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.

4 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. USB? Ick. by Space+Coyote · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    ___
    Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
  2. USB? What were they thinking? by guttentag · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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).

  3. save your money and get a 7500/7600 by smagoun · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

  4. Biggest flaw - No TV out ports! by jjh37997 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.