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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.

11 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.

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    Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
    1. Re:USB? Ick. by jht · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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      -- Josh Turiel
      "2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
  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. I can see the disclaimer on the Commerical now... by motardo · · Score: 4, Funny

    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"

  4. The problem with MPEG-1 by benwaggoner · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    My video compression blog
  5. Not a Rumor by robertchin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. The difference is... by chris_martin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    -- Chris Martin, System Administrator
  7. None of these PC devices have nailed it by bitmason · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  8. Poor-Man's DVD Recorder by Nomad7674 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  9. 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.

  10. More information by ruiner13 · · Score: 4, Informative
    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!

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    today is spelling optional day.