Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Is your browser retarded?
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.
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).
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 ...
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"
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.
My video compression blog
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?
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
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.
--
$tar -xvf
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.
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.
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.
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
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.
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.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I just hope it is compatible with European TV signals...
superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
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.
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!
"If it smells like fish, don't eat it" - Dad
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.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Except no shipping Macs use USB 2.0. Maybe it will in the future, but not now.
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.
fencepost
just a little off
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.
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.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/broadcast
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
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.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
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.
-twb
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.
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
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
I got most of my info from this link: http://www.macintoshdigitalhub.com/reviews/eyetv/i ndex.html. Hope this helps clear stuff up!
today is spelling optional day.
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...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
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.
No DRM, no Microsoft! What could be nicer? Now when will the PAL version be coming?
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.
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.
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.
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.
-- thinkyhead software and media
> 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.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
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.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore