Review: EyeTV

EyeTV from El Gato Software is a USB peripheral housing an MPEG-1 encoder, a TV tuner, and coaxial and RCA inputs, and accompanying Mac OS X software to operate the tuner and record and playback programs, saving the data to your local hard drive. In less geeky terms, it is a digital video recorder for your Mac. Boffo. OK, there's nothing exactly unique about a DVR for your computer. But this one is made for Mac OS X, and it works with any Mac OS X box that has USB.

I've been using it for a couple of months now. I schedule it to record The Daily Show four nights a week, along with all my Sunday political shows, so I can watch (er, listen to) them as I work. I turn the news on in the middle of the day. I watch hockey games while I am working late. And because I have a big ol' 160GB FireWire hard drive, I can save a lot of programs without worrying about deleting (one hour takes 650MB at standard/VCD quality, and 1.3GB at high quality). And if I have Toast, I can burn VCDs directly from EyeTV for posterity.

The performance is fine. Because the MPEG encoder is in the EyeTV box, most of the performance drag is where it has to be: playing back movie files, and writing them to disk. I keep EyeTV hooked up to my house file/web server (a PowerBook G3/500 which also serves as MP3/CD/DVD player and -- now -- television), and when I go on the road, I merely copy a bunch of programs to my laptop. Warning: watching Trigger Happy TV on the subway can be a bit dangerous; people think the abandoned aluminum foil hat under the bench belongs to you.

To view a recording on another computer, you Save to QuickTime Movie from EyeTV, or you can install another copy of the EyeTV software on another computer, and copy the EyeTV files over.

If you want to copy individual recordings, either bypassing Save to QuickTime Movie (the movies will play just fine in QuickTime Player), or copying selected recordings to your other EyeTV folder (instead of all of them), it can be difficult to locate the right files: the filenames don't really tell you anything about what's inside. So, I wrote a command-line utility to search the recordings.

Also, it is difficult, but not impossible, to edit programs. QuickTime tools don't allow for editing MPEG-1. You can "export to QuickTime", but you won't be able to edit the resulting file. What you'll need to do is demux (I use bbDEMUX) the file into separate audio and video streams, then convert the streams and merge them back together.

I convert the demuxed audio to AIFF with SoundApp (under Classic) and then put that file in the same directory as the demuxed video, one called "movie.aiff" and the other "movie.m1v", and when I open the video in QuickTime Player, it merges them together automatically (a nice time-saver). Then I export it to MPEG-4 format. This process can be very tedious, and is prone to failure for large files, but it can be done.

I did have problems for awhile with EyeTV not saving recordings. I had set my drive to spin down, and EyeTV wouldn't properly spin it up; I changed my Energy Saver prefs to not sleep the disk whenever possible, and the problem was solved. There are some other minor glitches: for instance, the software allows the screen to dim and screen savers to come on during playback, and there is the occasional crash (which happens less with the latest release of the software). Also, as the resolution is 352x240 (regardless of quality setting), I don't want to use it to watch programs that demand high resolution. I'll record those on the DirecTiVo.

But really, the only serious problem I have had with EyeTV is the scheduling. You can use the TitanTV service via a web browser, which is a nice idea, but it is often incredibly slow, such that finding the program and manually adding it can be less frustrating, if not faster, than going through the browser.

The service has improved recently, so maybe it won't be much of an issue anymore for some people, but for me, a better solution is Karelia's Watson, which is similar to Apple's Sherlock, but better in most respects (more and mostly better tools, and faster). The new version of Watson (1.6, released Tuesday) has new buttons in the TV Listings tool, one for "watch," one for "record," and even one for adding the program to iCal. I use Watson to quickly find the program I want, I hit the right button, and EyeTV is ready to go. You can't beat that with a stick, although it will cost you another $29 for the privilege, if for some insane reason you've not yet purchased Watson.

I also use EyeTV to digitize other video sources; you can play back something from your TiVo or VCR and record a copy to take with you on your next trip. I have a Meade telescope with an electronic eyepiece, so I can record the moon. Mmmmmm, moon.

EyeTV isn't perfect; the software could use some improvement, it could be easier to convert to an editable file format, and the resolution could be better (which will require updated hardware, perhaps using FireWire). In the meantime, I could live without EyeTV, but I wouldn't want to. It's a nice device to have.

Comments

What about satellite users?

[bwalling]

I have Direct TV (and a DirecTivo). All of these computer tuning devices seem to support cable, but not satellite. Are there any devices/TV Tuner cards out there for satellite users (I assume the device/card would need an access card)?

Re:What about satellite users?

[mgs1000]

Okay, this is what you do:

1. buy an ethernet card for your Tivo http://9thtee.com/

2. Install it, and the software that comes with it

3. Add the module noscramble.o (find it on the dealdatabase.com forums)

4. Install TyTool on your computer to extract the mpeg-2 video to your PC(find it on the aforementioned forums)

Re:What about satellite users?

[Anonvmous Coward]

This link might be interesting to you:

http://shop.store.yahoo.com/snapstreammedia/cablep acks.html

Snapstream is a PC-based DVR. This is their solution to the satellite question. I'm not sure what it does for Mac, but it does show that Satellite users are not left out. :)

Re:What about satellite users?

[swb]

I don't know about satellite, but I wish there was a more open standard for digital cable tuners. I'd like to see them included in TVs, VCRs, Tivos, or other devices, even if it only means "closed" non-PC devices (ie, no capture cards, I wouldn't count Tivo as a PC, others may disagree).

I hate the idea of having to pony up $8 per TV for tuners. It'd be great if they could be integrated into the device directly.

I don't know how practical this would be -- I'd imagine that there are multiple digital cable standards out there (Motorola, Scientific Atlanta, etc) and probably little desire for a common standard.

I'm also curious about the economics to the cable company. While I'm sure my SA2100 box wasn't $500 in bulk to the CATV company, I can't see them making a profit off the box @ $8 per month for at least a year, maybe two.

If I could take a few weeks off work and had a few thousand to spend, I could do a decent job of rewiring my house and get a couple of TVs per CATV tuner box, centralized Tivo, etc, but not now.

Re:What about satellite users?

[Anonymous Coward]

5. Profit!!!

Re:What about satellite users?

[BigJimSlade]

Okay, this is what you do:

1. buy an ethernet card for your Tivo http://9thtee.com/

2. Install it, and the software that comes with it

3. Add the module noscramble.o (find it on the dealdatabase.com forums)

4. Install TyTool on your computer to extract the mpeg-2 video to your PC(find it on the aforementioned forums)

5. Add a VideoLan server into the mix to serve up the video to any of your PCs!

Re:What about satellite users?

[Drishmung]

The digital TV stuff is very standard. It's MPEG-2.Of course, it's also very scrambled to prevent piracy. Each company tends to use its own standard (well, there are three or four in total that are in use).

Now, MPEG-2 is standard, but not terribly 'open', as it encumbered with patents. If you want to sell someone an MPEG-2 decoder, you need to pay licence fees to the patent holders. That's been one of the problems with releasing free MPEG-2 decoders for Quicktime, since Apple would have to pay royalties per player.

The STBs are made in Taiwan, in the millions. Economy of scale, heavy automation, and very low wages, combine to ensure that your STB cost the CATV company less than $200. I'd say that even so, at $8/month, it takes them at least 13 months to make any money off you.

Re:What about satellite users?

[swb]

The video stream is the easy part, and I knew that was standardized, although I wonder how many vendor-specific tweaks and extensions to MPEG2 have been done by the major cable system vendors.

The standardization I was talking about was the layer 2/3/4 communication that enables authorization, pay-per-view, guide data, and so on.

It'd be kind of cool if the major vendors had decided that the boxes themselves would just be java machines with a standard boot protocol, and everything else that ran on them was downloaded to the box from the headend, instead of hardcoded into the box. Make it easier for TV, PVR, and third parties to make boxes that fit the standard. The major vendors could then still make money to cable co's selling headend systems and software, instead of closed hardware/software systems!

Re:What about satellite users?

[Drishmung]

I don't believe any tweaks etc have been done to MPEG-2. OTOH, there is lots of room in MPEG to put the stuff the CATV people need, namely conditional access and guide/interactivity.

There are a very few CA systems. Moto have their own, nearly every one else uses one of two other vendors. This is the Smart Card stuff. It's 'standard', but they are very paranoid about revealing how it works, as if it is broken it costs tens of millions of $ to fix.

The other bit is middleware. Rather than write for every processor in every model of every STB, most manufacturers now use one of two or three middleware systems. At least one of these is Java based, but most are not (although they will run Java). MS tried to own this space with WinCE but so far has been laughed at.

So, what you want is what is already in place, but the target system isn't quite what you expect maybe. BTW, the OS on most of these STBs is VxWorks from Wind River.

I was going to build

[batboy78]

I was going to build a Linux PVR, but this sounds interesting. Any chances of Linux controlling software?

Re:I was going to build

[Anonymous Coward]

freevo.sf.net

and use standard hardware instead of one particular brand

this thing....

[Anonymous Coward]

has been around for quite a while now.

Naming question

[American AC in Paris]

This product was designed for use with MacOS X.

This product can also be used to record full length motion pictures, which is piracy as far as certain industry groups are concerned.

Thus, shouldn't this product be called "iEyeTV"?

Re:Naming question

[Anonymous Coward]

Aye Aye, Captain!

Re:Naming question

[miTTio]

A pirate walks into a bar, with a steering wheel on his crotch.

The bartender brings this to the pirate's attention.

The pirate replies: "AArghh! It's driving me nuts!"

Re:Naming question

[LinuxHam]

Thus, shouldn't this product be called "iEyeTV"?

But that would lead to too much pirating...

(rimshot)

Re:Naming question

[uvasmith]

Speaking of ...

Did you here about the new pirate movie?

It's rated AArghh!

Sigh...it never gets old.

Re:Naming question

[miTTio]

that is because pirate jokes are timeless

Re:Naming question

[Wise Dragon]

Aye, because of all the booty!

Great, except I don't want to make a Mac

[georgeha]

the focal point of my entertainment system. I have a divx box (awaiting a new TV out card), it's a small, unobtrusive, 2 pci slot Dell, sitting under my cable box. Unless you look at it closely, it doesn't even look like a computer, and it doesn't take away attention from my 32 inch flat screen TV.

Maybe when Apple comes out with a small form computer (other than that silly cube) that looks like a generic A/V peripheral and costs $300 I will consider this.

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac

[Dot.Com.CEO]

I would think the 32'' tv would be the focal point of your entertainment system ;-)

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac

[batboy78]

What are the specs for your divx box? Does it capture and encode into Divx or play back only?

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac

[l33t j03]

Problem is the 32" flat panel TV is actually a 15" Optimus TV/VCR combo that he pretends is a 32" flat panel.

See, thats why the Mac would be the focal point.

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac

[milovoo]

>Maybe when Apple comes out with a small form
>computer (other than that silly cube) that looks
>like a generic A/V peripheral and costs $300 I
>will consider this.

Why? Are you too much of a wimp to put
the board in a different case? I have
my beige G3 in a custom box that looks
great with my equipment, and controls
the CD changer [slink-e] and plays mpegs
and DVDs, all with an obviously better
interface and no $$ to microsoft.

-milo

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Until you can control the slink-e from Unix (and a command line, ideally), it's still just a windows toy. Colby is too much of a Windows hacker for his own good.

Ideally, a little PIC MCPU in front of it would take a lot of the programming away from what a host computer needs to do. It's a pity - the slink-e is a neat idea that's been stagnant for 3-4 years. It had potential to be a key home automation piece.

Finally:
And a laptop has both a built in UPS, the USB you need, makes less heat that a full blown MoBo and I bet you could find a powerbook with a dead LCD from somebody. Far less power and less cooling needs than a corrupted^Wconverted desktop mobo

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac

[milovoo]

>Until you can control the slink-e from Unix (and a
>command line, ideally), it's still just a windows
>toy. Colby is too much of a Windows hacker for his
>own good.

I agree that a unix version would be nice but,
you got something against the title track guy?

http://www.titletrack.com

I've used both and I like titletrack better, cause
I don't play with windows toys.

-milo

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

umm, what the other repliers are neglecting to ask is.. what makes you think you need a mac? You only need a mac for THIS piece of hardware, not a DVR setup in general...

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac

[Erik K. Veland]

I know you will kill me for this, but I'm "lucky" enough to have broken my PowerBook G4 (yes, the top 500 Mhz model in it's first revision). The problem is that I can't afford to fix it (again, since I dropped it once before, and then one more time when my little sister spilled coke in it). Especially since it will cost me half a new one to do so.

Well, it turns out it's just the monitor that's borked. So I hook it up to my TV, connect my Keyspan Digital Media Remote and I have an ultra-slim übercool form factor media center that runs Mac OS X, plays DVDs, VCDs, Div-Xs, MovieTrailers right off the net and streams MP3s straight of my LAN.

I'm saving up to buy a new PowerBook (that I won't drop) right now.

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Good. Steve Jobs needs a new yacht.

Some other owner comments

[bbk]

You can find some other comments by owners Here .

The general feeing is that the drivers aren't up to snuff yet, but it's a neat idea and a relatively nice to work with.

BBK

Re:Some other owner comments

[faster]

El Gato makes Toast for Roxio (long story truncated: the Toast guys quit, Roxio begged, they said "we won't be your employees, but pay our company and we'll keep working on Toast"), so it will get better. They do have a clue about creating great software.

bitrate limitations

[Drunken Coward]

The transfer speed of USB is limited to 1.5 Mb/s (theoretical, in real world terms it's far lower), while a high quality VCD (MPEG-1) is nearly twice that. If you have a Mac, why not take advantage of the built in IEE-1396 that has come standard in Macs since 2000? Faster speed potential is your friend, especially with video. It's hard for me to imagine something inferior to VHS able to replace a VCR (in terms of ease of use and quality).

Re:bitrate limitations

[jolshefsky]

Umm ... USB is limited to 12 megabits/second or 1.2 megabytes/second which is about 10 times faster than low-quality VCD (150 kilobytes/second) and about 5 times faster than high-quality VCD (about 300 kilobytes/second.)

You might be thinking of low-speed devices which run at the slower 1.5 megabits/second if I recall correctly ... I haven't seen one, though.

Re:bitrate limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

Macs (and most other people now) call it Firewire. If you want to be a geek about it, at least get the number right - IEEE-1394 (not 1396).

Re:bitrate limitations

[panZ]

While you are correct about the pipe being big enough for 300kB/s I have a few minor corrections because I am anal retentive. =P

12megabits/sec (Mb/s) is 1.5 megabytes/sec (MB/s) which is the theoretical max for full speed USB. You can take about 1/3 of that off for packet overhead and timing as well leaving a full speed device about 1MB/sec of isoch data to play with. That is more than enough for a decent video stream like you said.

One other thing, you see low speed USB devices all the time. What do you think your USB mouse is?

Re:bitrate limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

That's 1394, doofus

Re:bitrate limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two different specs for USB, 1.0 and 2.0. USB 1.0 is substantially slower than 2.0, approximately by the amounts you each claim for "USB". The EyeTV faq (here) says: "EyeTV will work on any Mac with a built-in USB port" and I see no mention of a specific version of USB, which leads me to conclude that the EyeTV supports USB 1.0, not 2.0.

All the cool stuff is for Mac.

[Blimey85]

Damn. I use to be a Mac nut but I finally went to the dark side.. then I switched to Linux but anyway, now that I don't have access to a Macintosh anymore, I keep reading about all of this cool stuff you can do on Macs. Granted even if I had a Mac, I probably couldn't afford to get the cool stuff but at least then my dreams would be a bit more realistic.

This Eye thing seems pretty cool. I've really been wanting something that would allow me to easily record video and then edit it. It would just be stupid silly stuff like me sticking a picture of my head into a still of some episode of Seinfield or something but it would still be fun.

Are there any plans to make a version of this for PC's or is there something similar already avail for PC's?

Re:All the cool stuff is for Mac.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, for the PC we've the ATI All-In-Wonder for about...eleventeen years... which linux supports... check it out

Re:All the cool stuff is for Mac.

[Anonymous Coward]

there are hundreds of things like this for the pc.
cheaper too

all the cool stuff is for macs? by one or 2 vendors. for the pc there are 20-30 vendors making the sutff

Re:All the cool stuff is for Mac.

[milovoo]

>for the pc there are 20-30 vendors making the sutff

Conveniently insuring that almost none of
it will actually work together.

-milo

USB 1.1

[batboy78]

Does USB 1.1 have the bandwidth to store HDTV signals into MPEG-1? I have used a WinTV USB Tuner before for video capture, and I must say the framrates weren't that good.

I would like to see a firewire or USB 2.0 device that is platform independent. That way I would never miss another episode of Smallville again.

Re:USB 1.1

[Anonymous Coward]

hdtv into vcd quality just negated the hdtv

Re:USB 1.1

[Anonymous Coward]

no, not even close. ATSC signals are 19.5 mbegabits/sec, USB is 12.5 megabits/sec. A fully expanded 1080i signal is about 125 mbytes/sec, which blows way past firewire. if you're recording to a DVHS via firewire, about the best non-compressed you can expect is 480p.

and why mpeg1? why not divx?

Re:USB 1.1

[batboy78]

So I can later burn to DVD. I'm working on my Smallville Season 2 DVD now.

Re:USB 1.1

[benwaggoner]

an ATSC (USA standard) HDTV stream goes up to about 19.2 Mbps, so no, USB 1.1 doesn't have the bandwidth needed. And it's MPEG-2, not MPEG-1.

If you want to convert it to a low resolution MPEG-1, sure. But why?

Agreed - good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using Eye TV, on a PowerBook G3/500 as well, for a few months. The first couple releases of the software were "too slow" - recordings came out with pausing and other glitching - but between OS X improvements and ElGato's improvements, it's working perfectly fine right now.

I've only used it to record VHS video tapes. I generally don't watch TV at all, and don't care much to know what the current schlock on TV is. But I do want to save the VHS video tapes onto a more permanent medium. A good thing is that it even records tapes that are Macrovision encoded.

The quality isn't superb, but the price is right.

Formac (http://www.formac.com) has a box that claims higher quality, similar features, and connects via Firewire. It has a higher price too.

- David

Re:Agreed - good stuff

[Mononoke]

But I do want to save the VHS video tapes onto a more permanent medium.

Unless you are carving those Ones and Zeros into a gold platter, you're not saving to a more permanent medium.

In the short-term, a digital storage medium may allow more accesses before data degredation, but for the long-term no digital storage medium can be considered "permanent."

Freevo!

[xchino]

This device seems it would be well suited for Freevo. I hope it can be made functional under Linux or Winblows as well. That would be a huge threat to the existance of commercial DVR's such as Tivo.

Re:Freevo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or mythtv, which actually works as a PVR, unlike freevo.

Hello Shitty Quality

[scosol]

MPEG1?
USB1.1 does not have the bandwidth to capture that at any decent framerate/resolution.
In my experience, the only way this can be done is with devices that have build-in MPEG2(dvd) encoding chips, and a USB2/firewire interface.
See the Dazzle DVC150 or the Adaptec Vide-oh DVD.

Re:Hello Shitty Quality

[Twirlip of the Mists]

MPEG1? USB1.1 does not have the bandwidth to capture that at any decent framerate/resolution.

Twelve megabits is plenty for full-motion, full-resolution video. The SDTV signals you get over digital broadcast TV are only encoded at 4 Mbps, albeit with MPEG-2. MPEG-1 at 12 Mbps won't look that shit-hot, but that's a limitation of the codec, not of USB.

Re:Hello Shitty Quality

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Ack. Sorry to reply to my own post, but I let that last one go out with a typo. Damn you "Preview" button!

That should have read, "The SDTV signals you get over digital broadcast TV are only encoded at 8 Mbps, albeit with MPEG-2."

Oops.

Re:Hello Shitty Quality

[scosol]

You're missing some MAJOR points here-

It doesn't matter what Mbps the signals are sent to me at-
The TV is decoding them to full-resolution uncompressed analog video.
That's what's going to the input of this thing.

And look at the capture resolution, my webcam does better:
(and yes, USB can handle that ridiculous resolution at 30fps just fine, but thats TV quality, and looks really crappy on a computer monitor)
FWIW- HDTV and DVDs are at a much higher resolution as well.

"The EyeTV hardware captures at a fixed resolution of 352 by 240 pixels and compresses both video and audio to MPEG-1. The frame rate is full NTSC 29.97 fps. There are two quality settings: These do not change the capture resolution but affect the data capture rate. Standard quality captures at 170 kB/sec. Using this setting the captured video can be burned to a Video CD using Toast Titanium. High quality captures at 340 kB/sec. Both standard quality and high quality recordings can be exported as QuickTime movies."

Re:Hello Shitty Quality

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I have to confess that your point about "it doesn't matter what Mbps the signals are sent to me at" was completely lost on me. Huh?

USB can handle that ridiculous resolution at 30fps just fine, but thats TV quality, and looks really crappy on a computer monitor

That is, after all, what we're talking about here. TV signals: 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second. That's all the data you're ever going to get out of an SDTV signal, no matter how you slice it. This particular encoder down-rezzes the picture to half-D1, but that's to comply with the VideoCD spec, not a limitation of USB per se.

FWIW- HDTV and DVDs are at a much higher resolution as well.

HDTV, yes; DVD, no. HDTV can come in a variety of formats, but the most common are 1080i (1080 lines at 59.94 fields per second) and 720p (720 lines at 60 frames per second). DVD, on the other hand, has exactly one resolution: 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second, same as over-the-air television. Some-- many-- DVD players can do a reverse 3:2 pulldown and turn the 480i picture back into a 480/24p picture, but that's just trickery with fields. It doesn't actually give you any more resolution. Also, most DVDs contain an anamorphic picture that your TV stretches out (or squeezes down, depending on whether your screen is 4:3 or 16:9), but that doesn't magically give you any more resolution either. In fact, you're decreasing the effective horizontal resolution of the picture when you do it. You're trading horizontal resolution for vertical resolution, and just about everybody agrees that it's a good trade-off.

But the idea that DVDs contain more resolution than regular TV signals is a myth.

Re:Hello Shitty Quality

[scosol]

> I have to confess that your point about "it doesn't matter what Mbps the signals are sent to me at" was completely lost on me. Huh?

The data is going through several steps there:
MPEG2 Data-> In to TV:
First it's uncompressed to digital full-frame RGB values.
Then it is converted to an analog signal and displayed.
You hooking a capture device up to the RCA video-out on the TV doesn't give you access to the original compressed stream at all- all you see is the analog full-RGB signals.
Sorry- I don't know how to explain it any better than that.
Use this as an example- imagine that the input stream to the TV was the lowest-bitrate, most blocky and shitty 28.8k stream youve ever seen.
If you were capturing the output, you would *still* be capturing the full uncompressed analog frames at the exact same rate- regardless of the original "source" bitrate.

> That is, after all, what we're talking about here. TV signals: 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second. That's all the data you're ever going to get out of an SDTV signal, no matter how you slice it. This particular encoder down-rezzes the picture to half-D1, but that's to comply with the VideoCD spec, not a limitation of USB per se.

Great- but that's not all we're talking about-
Modern DV cameras produce resolutions higher than that.
Additionally, when reencoding from an analog signal, you want to get the highest resolution possible to make the end result the best as possible.
This device is *severely* limited- period.

Re:Hello Shitty Quality

[Twirlip of the Mists]

If you were capturing the output, you would *still* be capturing the full uncompressed analog frames at the exact same rate- regardless of the original "source" bitrate.

Ah, I see the problem. You don't realize that this device takes analog video input and encodes it to an MPEG-1 bitstream, then sends the bitstream over the USB connection to the computer. The data pushed over USB in this case never exceeds about 180 KB/s, so USB is more than adequate for that task.

If this device included a better encoder, it could generate an MPEG-2 bitstream at 6 Mbps, which is visually indistinguishable from broadcast-quality SDTV to the casual observer. USB could carry that bitstream to the computer quite easily. You said, "USB1.1 does not have the bandwidth to capture that at any decent framerate/resolution." That's not true at all.

Modern DV cameras produce resolutions higher than that.

Wrong. "Modern DV cameras" produce exactly 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second, nothing more. (Well, NTSC cameras, anyway. PAL cameras produce a picture that's slightly different.) In fact, they produce a picture that's considerably worse than broadcast quality, because the DV codec preserves full-bandwidth luminance data but discards more than half of the color data. In video jargon, this is called "4:1:0." Whereas broadcast-quality video (4:2:2) can be represented as an 8, 6, or even 4 Mbps bitstream with no objectionable artifacts or macroblocking, DV video (including DVCPRO and DVCAM) can easily be squeezed down to a megabit or less, due to the lower effective resolution in the color channels.

This device is *severely* limited- period.

That's true, but not for the reason you keep repeating. It's got nothing to do with USB qua USB. It's limited by the fact that it includes a cheap MPEG encoder chip. Saying "USB1.1 does not have the bandwidth to capture that at any decent framerate/resolution" is just exaggeration.

Re:Hello Shitty Quality

[Chasing Amy]

> DVD, on the other hand, has exactly one resolution: 480 lines at 59.94 fields per second

No, you forget that NTSC is not the only encoding system in common usage. There are DVDs which are encoded to PAL resolution--for example, the "Red Edition" of *Dellamorte Dellamore* which I just finished watching a few hours ago on my region-free DVD setup. ;-)

Re:Hello Shitty Quality

[Twirlip of the Mists]

If I recall, I did specifically disclaim at the outset that I was talking about NTSC, and that the numbers would be slightly different under PAL but that the key concepts would be the same.

If I left out that disclaimer, then I thought I'd disclaimed it, and I deserve your correction. But all in all, I'm just too damned lazy to go sifting through my posts looking for it.

ordered one two days ago

[krel]

and i feared this digitizer would be as crappy as that old global village one, but this right here says it's not! thank you slashdot!

USB vs. Firewire

[ThesQuid]

I've used several USB video input devices for several different Macs, and sad to say, I won't even consider buying one of these gadgets for myself until they use Firewire. They just return substandard results, with frequent drop-outs. Sorry.

Re:USB vs. Firewire

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Whether the device uses USB or not probably has nothing to do with quality of the encoded material. As I said in another post, broadcast TV only uses 8 Mbps (of MPEG-2), so the 12 Mbps available over USB is plenty. (Assuming you're not sharing that particular bus, but that's obvious.)

Now, your experience may simply have been with crappy devices. But that doesn't necessarily mean that USB sucks.

I mean, USB does suck, but just not in this particular way.

Re:USB vs. Firewire

[Cy Guy]

I assume you are referring to USB 1.x. USB 2.0 is direct competitor to firewire.

But yeah, you can understand why they lock you into the low resolution, you'd never get full screen hi-resolution over a USB 1.x connection using MPEG 1 compression.

I think the whole thing is pretty overpriced for what you get though. I got the Video Blaster card with the same features (but with full screen video) at CompUSA last month and it was only $50. While I know that many Mac owners don't have the option of putting new cards in their boxes, a 300% markup seems kind of steep for an external unit that also has more limited capability.

Also, what is up with the 20MB software installation? You can play MPEG1 files with QuickTime, so all you need is a scheduling interface.

Re:USB vs. Firewire

[clarkcox3]

Actually, with USB, any single device can only use up to half of the max (i.e. 6 Mbps). Yes you can have a total of 12 Mbps flowing over the cable, but only if that is 2 or more devices.

USB is great for input devices (keyboards, mice, joysticks) and medium bandwidth devices (scanners, printers, digital sound in/out) but USB is simply not a good idea to use when transferring anything more bandwidth intensive than sound.

FireWire, on the other hand has guaranteed bandwidth allotments (i.e. a device can say "I will need 300 Mbps", and all other devices on that bus will be limited to the remaining bandwidth), which makes it perfect for digital video.

Re:USB vs. Firewire

[operaman]

Actually, USB should be fine, as long as you're not doing anything else that uses the USB bus (like typing, moving the mouse, listening to music via USB Speakers, etc...) ;-).

All of those things suck up the bandwith quite quickly, and you WILL get poor quality and performance.

FireWire is a much better bus for these kinds of things because it was designed to not drop frames, even under very heavy traffic.

Re:USB vs. Firewire

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently recorded a 3 hour NASCAR race and it didn't drop a frame once.

for the love of god

[cygnus]

ok, i'm not mac os x savvy enough to know this, so i'll ask:

why hasn't someone written drivers for Hauppauge cards yet? they cost a fraction of the price of this product.

Re:for the love of god

[Anonymous Coward]

They're still trying to figure out how to say the name...

Re:for the love of god

[Cyn]

actually hauppage cards have come BUNDLED with drivers since they were first offered for sale. It's amazing that people don't realize this, as it's hard to use them without.

Oh, did you mean using hauppage cards under linux/bsd? They don't come bundled but it's quite possible. v4l is your friend.

Oh, did you mean using hauppage cards under osx? I suppose it's theoretically possible, desktop Apple's have PCI slots now right? I guess it's merely a matter of interest - you have to have people with the need (don't have tivo/etc.) and the knowledge, who also have the time - many times the time cost far outweighs the cost of just buying the device.

Re:for the love of god

[cygnus]

actually hauppage cards have come BUNDLED with drivers since they were first offered for sale. It's amazing that people don't realize this, as it's hard to use them without.

oh, wiseguy, eh? thanks a bunch.

Oh, did you mean using hauppage cards under osx? I suppose it's theoretically possible, desktop Apple's have PCI slots now right? I guess it's merely a matter of interest - you have to have people with the need (don't have tivo/etc.) and the knowledge, who also have the time - many times the time cost far outweighs the cost of just buying the device.

yes, the pro macs have PCI. theoretically, there's open sourced drivers for linux or bsd out there somewhere, right? why can't those be hacked into os x? things like that have happened before.

why not just use software

[Anonymous Coward]

and a software or encoder card for your mac to do it? write some simple perl scripts to start and stop the program and bam! all done. it's not like the mac doesn't support real-time codecs. i mean mpeg1, come on that's so 1988.

IE

[Triv]

Q. Do I have to use Internet Explorer to access TitanTV?

A. Yes. EyeTV always uses Internet Explorer because other browsers do not work properly with the TitanTV.com web site.

Well, I'm going to assume that makes it unappealing for most of us mac-people, doesn't it? I don't even have IE on my machine anymore - I got rid of it when chimera hit .6.

Added to which, the only reason I'd get a box like this would be to get rid of my TV - hook my VCR and various consoles through the Mac. But according to the FAQ there's a 1.5 second delay between signal output and display, making games unplayable. Damnit. :)

Triv

Re:IE

[pudge]

IIRC, I had to use MSIE to sign up for TitanTV, but I used Mozilla fine with it. I needed to manually modify my browser settings (I forget how) so it would call EyeTV when it got that certain file type, etc. But as noted in my review, TitanTV is unnecessary, and IMO not preferable, to using Watson.

Re:IE

[Anonymous Coward]

The instructions for setting up Mozilla with TitanTV & EyeTV are available from

http://homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/FileSharing.w oa /wa/default?user=bscholln&templatefn=FileSharing.h tml&aff=consumer&cty=US&lang=en

I'm also setting up a small section on EyeTV on

http://bschollnick.phpwebhosting.com/digital

- Ben

Re:IE

[Bob Hearn]

I ordered one the day they came out, but sent it back when I discovered it required IE. Their website had no mention of this requirement at that point. One other discovery that made it useless to me was the fact that it doesn't work in Canada - I'm moving to Vancouver.

Does anyone know of any PVRs that do work in Canada? I don't think I can watch regular TV again.

Re:IE

[non-poster]

MythTV does.

Saw it...passed

[droopus]

I saw EyeTV at Macworld NYC during the summer. I had my credit card out to buy one, but saw the MPEG1 quality, and put the card away.

I have a couple of Tivos and the EyeTV quality is well below even the lowest quality I can get on my Tivo. I would rate it at about the same level as a decent telesync of a film...no better. I asked why no MPEG4/Divx compression and didn't get a decent answer.

Also, I don't want to watch TV off my Mac, even on a Cinema Display. I could stream it to my tv using Qcast but then what's the point? Might as well just buy a Tivo.

I'm the most gullible of early adopters and I didn't buy EyeTV. Hopefully it'll improve in time.

I did however buy the very cool Powermate volume knob that they were using to control EyeTV. That's turned out to be a neat gadget, and really nice for film editing.

Re:Saw it...passed

[jdcook]

Am I the only one who looked at the Powermate knob mentioned inthe parent and wondered about Tempest on MAME?

Re:Saw it...passed

[clarkcox3]

*cough* Atari paddle *cough*

Re:Saw it...passed

[margaret]

I had my credit card out to buy one, but saw the MPEG1 quality, and put the card away.

My Time Warner digital cable is so blocky already I doubt I would notice a difference in quality ;-)

Re:Saw it...passed

[benwaggoner]

As long as it targets MPEG-1 in VCD compatible mode, that means only 352x240 resolution. The only way that's going to look good on a Cinema display is if it just plays in a small window. Even a good 720x480 DVD can show with problems digital scaled up that much. It isn't as bad with CRT, since the video card can lower the resolution, softening out some of the scaling artifacts you get with a fixed resolution display.

Re:Saw it...passed

[WhaDaYaKnow]

I asked why no MPEG4/Divx compression and didn't get a decent answer.

The answer would be that at least until recently no hardware compression chips where available. Because the data is sent over the slow USB bus, it has to be compressed by the device, before it goes over the bus.

If they had used Firewire, any compression could have been used, provided that the Mac's CPU can handle it in real-time.

so the question is.....

[Lumpy]

anyone hack it so it works under linux yet??

preferrably NOT using the mess called video4linux.

i'd like a real video record app, not something that kinda works.

try formac's firewire solution

[redherring22]

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

Re:try formac's firewire solution

[WatertonMan]

That does look very, very nice.

I found a few reviews on Google:

http://www.whatcamcorder.net/frame.html?http://www .whatcamcorder.net/reviews/VideoEditing/Formac/For macStudio.shtml

http://www.ibook-user.com/reviews/review-formac.ht ml

http://www.synchrotech.com/product-1394/analog-dv- converter_01.html

I'm afraid that MPEG-1 is a distinct turnoff with the EyeTV thing. Further USB seems far too slow. Has anyone used the Formac and would like to say how it works? I wished it did Digital Cable as I have that and many channels I'd like to record are on the digital. C'est la vie I guess.

Re:try formac's firewire solution

[scrypt]

The only problem with this approach, is that you will need a much, MUCH larger hard drive to record to. The Formac device stores video in DV format, which eats up 1gb for every 4 min. of footage. So, unless you just plan on recording commercials (or you have/plan to buy a large RAID), you will be better off with something that compresses the signal.

Re:try formac's firewire solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Post compress maybe using that nifty new cron feature of OS X. Maybe applescript imovie or something.

Re:try formac's firewire solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, you don't seem to understand the magic that is Quicktime. And I don't mean the program, I mean the API's available to it. Many of the Macs themselves are capable of real time encoding to either MPEG2 or Sorenson. And if someone hasn't made a program to take a DV stream and real-time it to a compressed format, it wouldn't take long.

Of course, the stipulation is that you have a fast (Quicksilver) tower..

Or just get one of those self contained RAID array's that use 1394..

Re:try formac's firewire solution

[mr100percent]

Sure, I've used the formac DV Studio. It comes in 2 flavors, one with an FM tuner, and one without.

It's got all you want, RF, S-Video, and Composite In and Out for all them. It's firewire and DV, so Final Cut Pro and iMovie can import the DV, even from a TV show. Qualitywise, it's DV so depending on your video source, it should look pretty good, very high quality copying.

Formac makes its own program to watch TV in a window, floating or regular, and lets you record channels on a schedule.

The OS X software, at the moment, sucks. There is a lag between changing channels and the change, and it eats up 80% of the CPU time on a Powerbook G4 800MHz. Recording a show is straight into DV-size uncompressed .mov files, unless you set otherwise. Recording just takes almost all your processor and HD use to keep up, which it does. A half-hour show gives me over a gigabyte of data, which I got Quicktime Pro for me to crunch down to smaller size (like MPEG-4, which does wonders).

Luckily, Formac announced they're working on a updated OS X version of the software, availible this month, which I eagerly await.

Re:try formac's firewire solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The most annoying problem with Formac's software is out-of-sync audio (which it inherits from the Sequence Grabber QuickTime component; iMovie bypasses the SG and achieves prefect sync. I've made a few attempts to mimic it, which essentially requires buffering a few frames of video, but I haven't been able to achieve the quality of iMovie yet). There's also the bulky UI and the fact that you can't watch TV while recording (even if you have plenty of CPU to spare).

BTW, the latest version (TiVeRon) hogs the CPU due to some (probably unnecessary) polling that occurs for as long as the helper application TiVeRon Timer is running. Preventing the helper app from launching solves this problem, at least for me.

Re:try formac's firewire solution

[Anonymous Coward]

CLITORIS CHOPPERS. Hi there you fucking Islamic career clerics, doctors of death, Waffen Schutzstaffel doctor Josef Mengele is a patron saint compared to you fucking ragheads. You suck. You aide and abet terror and death. You are partially responsible for the deaths of other fellow men. For this fratricide you shall pay dearly. Your soul is black with the stains of inaction, ineptitude and sympathies to those who walk the dark side. Your foul life is full of sins, not religious, just heinous, your karma is low, you don't confess, and you aren't in prison where you belong. You are your own dark, kept secret. I see through you, the worthless academic, the pseudo intellectual, the unproven unpublished un patented WASTE OF FUCKING FLESH. You are a drain on society, you are a member of the 1st world but pretend to not be. I hate you, you are a stained man.

Hi clitoris chopper, october_30th supports clitoris carving. You are Islamic, and of course are a fucking animal. I hate you you pull-start camel jockey lover. Towelheads, Camel Jockies, Sand Niggers, Ackmids, Abeebs, Carpet Flyers, Dune Coons, Rag Heads, Sand Scratchers, Habeebs, Abba-Dabbas, Camel-Humpers, Demi-niggers, Fig-Gobblers, Hucka-luckas (hucka hlacka ghalcka ghugh), Lefties (If you steal, you lose the right hand so, since they are thieves...) Ocnods, Pull-Start-ables (imagine pull starting Ossama's dirty rag like a Briggs and Stratton), Roach-Ranchers (habibs cant kill roaches by a tenant of Is-slum), Sand Moolies.

Shut up all you dirty fucking Islamic pigfucking swinehundts and the pigs, the communist fuckin Islamic terrorist supporter.

Take your fucking Koran and cram it up your ass. The sooner the earth sees Islam leave it, the better off it will be. Your Koran is Goat Piss.

I hope if there is a God and a Hell, you have to drink the liquidy shit from a Pig's ass, and Jewish Rabbis defecate on you.

I hate the stupid ISLAM fucks who read into the trash they come up with. Saddam Hussein [who needs to take a dirt nap] is higher on my sanity list than fucking Muslim "clerics." In fact, I like Saddam more than most of the other Arab leaders because he is secular. We should fucking nuke the Saudis and Mecca and Medina and turn it into rubble, then tell Saddam to remove the heads of all the buttfucking "royalty" in the area.

I want to wipe my ass with Mohammad's shroud. I want to grind his body up into bone meal and fertilize my garden with it.

Our tortured dead scream out in HORROR, asking for vengeance:

1. Kill all Camel Jockeys.
2. Kill all Mohammedans.
3. Kill all Dune Coons.
4. Kill all Rag Heads.
5. Kill all Towelheads.
6. Kill all Arabs.
7. Kill all Camel Rooters.
8. Kill all Osama Bin Laden supporters.

Nuke their countries to hell.

Nuke them again.

Death to Islam.

I piss on Mecca. I wipe my ass with the Koran. I shit upon Mohammed. I wipe the cum for a freshly fucked pussy with Mohammed's shroud then throw it in the pig sty so it can mire in pig shit as it decomposes.

I only hate with words, you fucking wet towel fucking scum killer, you maim, your terror bomber.

You will be judged and cast away by the powers that be, your death will get none of my pity and you will have precipitated it upon yourself, YOU xenophobic pieces of shit, your elitist religious country club will be your own undoing..

In the great continuum that it time your are those who serve to disrupt it by ending the brilliance and lives of those who your zealous foul religion call heathens and infidels. Your death will be celebrated, you will not be missed.

My rhetoric is a reflection of my anger at your, your Islamic death leaders, and your religions unwillingness to admit to what it really is, a death mongering cult.

Your religion is one which produces nothing that is meritorious, your artisans are not accomplished or made pariahs, social and economic structures in Islamic states are defunct, your religion is rife with inconsistency and moral shortcomings, your anti progress and western religion which is rooted in pagan beliefs is a pathetic made up religion that is the backwash of a crazed terrorist and mass killer, Mohammed. You cry Jihad, and call for holy war, and call for the death of the west and the infidels. We will defend ourselves. And since we know deep down what is right, and value our existence and the lives of our children and the meaning of freedoms, aspirations and some semblance of equality, we will crush you defending it. Prepare for your doom, each terrorist event only increases our resolve and fortitude, we must be forgiving and kind because your precious centers of idolatry, Mecca and Medina, are not sheets of glass yet.

One day, we will open a gold course and the 19TH hole bar will be in that fucking stone shack you foul idiots covet. Idolaters, pagan based, misguided pathetic violent destructive foul piece of trash religion.

Your corrupt leadership doesn't even attempt to save face. And we notice. Your religions inability to do anything but destroy is noted, and punishment will be exacted for your infractions, probably 10 fold, and you pigs will have precipitated on your own women and children the lancing fires of justice from the sky. Your bodies vaporized to ash where you can be one with the earth again from whence you came maybe one day your atoms will be incarnated again as a useful life form.

And the pussy bitch that defends Islam needs to die. And the Nation of Nigger Is-SLUM, where those sub creatures live, in the SLUMS of their own creation, is a piece of racist shit. So I give it back. You hate me, I hate you back 10 fold. Death to All Non-Secular Islam and Nigger Nation of Islam. Death.

DEATH. JIHAD against the JIHAD. I want to harvest organs from Islamic peoples who take their stupid shit religion seriously so they can be useful. Then I want Jewish Rabbis to piss and shit in the hole I left cutting your organs out, then I want to feed your Islamic bodies to pigs, let them shit you out in your final resting place, the pig sty.

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

We gotta use those 22" wide screen monitors for something, and I hate working on anything larger than a 15"

Get Watson 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought one of these the FIRST day they came out. I had been waiting for a good TV tuner for Os X for a while. The software support is very good, they come out with new updates all the time. And it has gotten better and better over time. They are promising new features soon. Although it can be used as a PVR, i never used it, because i HAD to use IE to get the stupid little files from TitanTV. The site is slow and the process sucks.

I just got Watson 1.6 (came out yesterday) and it RULES. Using the TV section when you find a show you want to record, click on it, then click on the EyeTV icon and it will set it up to record, it works GREAT!

Give it a try, i'm actually using it as a pvr now...

Re:Get Watson 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

make that watson 1.6.... sorry guys.

Re:Get Watson 1.5

[Znonymous Coward]

How would you rate the viewing picture quality?

To "store?"

[fireboy1919]

Perhaps you mean does it have the bandwidth to transmit MPEG-1 encoded video?

The answer is yes. More than enough for NTSC size and resolution. WinTV USB just sucks, and AFIAK it transmits uncompressed video.

A better question is exactly how much is done on the hardware before its transmitted to the computer. Its likely that the device merely does mjpeg encoding, which is then enhanced to full mpeg using software (because the motion component requires knowledge of several frames - more frames in memory means much higher cost for the device). If mjpeg is all it does, then this means that hacking it to Linux might require more work than otherwise (because you can do mjpeg more than one way since its just an intermediate step on the road to mpeg encoding, and not necessarily following a standard).

All I want is a USB 2.0 or Firewire tuner.

[dameron]

That'd do it, can't find it. If anyone knows where one is please post a link.

The bitrate limitations on the USB port makes this product D.O.A. as far as I can tell. Who wants to watch a tiny window of video on an expensive Apple monitor?

-dameron

Re:All I want is a USB 2.0 or Firewire tuner.

[nsayer]

It's not quite the same product, but there are a few analog-video-to-DV-over-firewire products. Dazzle makes a Hollywood DV Bridge, Miglia makes one as well (that looks nicer). I have the miglia on order and will provide a review when it arrives.

Answers to slews of dumb responses

[jolshefsky]

First, the MPEG-1 stream they're getting is VideoCD quality. VideoCD quality was designed to come from 1x CD-ROM drives which spit data at 150 kbytes/s which leaves plenty of bandwidth on the 1.2 mbytes/s USB.

Second, the picture quality is pretty low, but the files are "small" (i.e. the same as raw audio CD or about 600 mbytes/hour.) In all, it looks like VideoCD quality. It's better quality than a lot of QuickTime movies on the web, but a far cry from DVD, or even Sorensen on a good day. But it's good enough. I'd rank it around the quality of a 5 year-old VHS tape at EP. Far from videophile acceptability, but also far from unwatchable (unless you're a real snob about it.)

I happen to own one and I didn't have aspirations to download copies of movies and be able to watch them at DVD quality levels. It's so far worked fine to watch (oddly exactly the same as the reviewer) the Daily Show at work. I was looking for a quick way to create time-shifted copies of a handful of shows I watch. I also want to rip VHS tapes recorded at EP in 1995 and before to VideoCD and this looks like a great solution.

So anyway, my main point is, the tradeoffs are acceptable, and it's nice that it's bus-powered and includes its own tuner along with a video input.

Re:Answers to slews of dumb responses

[maggard]

+5 leading with a GLARING error?! What kinds of so-called Nerds are on /. these days?

First, the MPEG-1 stream they're getting is VideoCD quality. VideoCD quality was designed to come from 1x CD-ROM drives which spit data at 150 kbytes/s which leaves plenty of bandwidth on the 1.2 mbytes/s USB.

USB 1.1 runs at 12Mbps (little "b" for bits, not big "B" for bytes) for full-speed hardware devices and at about 1.5Mbps for low-speed hardware devices.

Re:Answers to slews of dumb responses

[Tokerat]

Well you're right, but the MSAL (Most-Significant Acronym Letter) is still correct.

• Worst-case senario:
• Low-Speed USB 1.1: 1,500,000 bits per second. (1.5Mbps * 1,000,000 bps)
• VideoCD data stream: 1,228,800 bits per second. (150KBps * 1024 bytes per KB * 8 bits per byte)

Woohoo! It works!

(semi-ot): tv/radio capture in linux?

[Tyler Eaves]

I've been wanting a radio capture card for a while (For Car Talk, Bob&Tom, etc...) and I've noticed most of them are part of TV tuner cards. Anyone know of one that works well under linux? Uder $50 would be nice ...

Re:(semi-ot): tv/radio capture in linux?

[BigJimSlade]

I've been wanting a radio capture card for a while (For Car Talk, Bob&Tom, etc...) and I've noticed most of them are part of TV tuner cards. Anyone know of one that works well under linux? Uder $50 would be nice ...

Video4Linux drivers support a number of FM tuners. I thought it would be cool to have a linux PVR for catching various radio talk shows that I miss (Car Talk is one of them... it's on way to early Saturdays in my area)

MacAddict Review

[NutMan]

MacAddict had a review of EyeTV and also MyTV.

They liked EyeTV as well.

Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge

[red_dragon]

For those who'd rather have a FireWire device, there's the Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge, which I've been wanting to buy for some time now. The DV Bridge, however, is bidirectional (D->A and A->D), has S-Video and Firewire ports, doesn't have a TV Tuner, and goes for about $100 more, making it more geared towards video editing than just video recording á la TiVo.

Re:Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge

[WiseWeasel]

You can actually find the Dazzle DV Bridge for about the same price by now, so there's no competition, Eye TV loses. That is unless the TV tuner is key for you, but you can still rig up some programmed recording using AppleScript, cron and Final Cut Pro and just use it with whatever tuner works for your TV service.

come on fellas

[Anonymous Coward]

what's up with this audience, it seems you guys have no clue about anything. Why is everybody so excited about this EyeTV for Mac OS X, wow it allows you to watch TV on your Mac, but what's so great about how it funtions, you can only record in mpeg1, you'd get better results using a VCR and think about this for a little more money you could assemble a windows personal video recorder, with more options than this will ever have. buh bye apple

I bought one recently, the quality is OK

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

...but I have tended to avoid TV recently, so my standards are not that high =)

It's neat as a PVR. Not the greatest quality, but good enough for me. The 1.5 second delay from live is too bad- I wanted to use it for gaming, too. But that delay is the cost of being able to pause live TV, instant replay your live TV, etc...

Tip- Register for my.yahoo.com, configure the TV listings, then just manually set programs if you don't have or want to use IE.

There is no technical reason why EyeTV *needs* IE. All Titan/IE does is download a file with a certain protocol that EyeTV is listed as a helper for.

My conclusion is it's worth the 150 bucks I spent on it. (Now if only Formac, or someone else, would EVER deliver OS X drivers for my dead ProTV card...!)

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac QWZX

[1155]

Actually, a keyboard from apple costs 59 dollars usd. You can get it in black or white, from here: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore.woa/144/wo/WZetV0ZSyQSIhPLKsI/0.3.0.3.27 .7.0.CoverPageLeftAccessoriesPromo.1.1.0.3.1.5.17. 3.1.1.0

Also, you can use any usb keyboard, mouse with your apple. I use a microsoft mouse with my iBook, the wireless intellimouse explorer. It's very nice, except for the battery consumption.

wintv

[Znonymous Coward]

I have Hauppauge WinTV for my PC and it's not very good. WinTV has problems with non-standard NTSC scaling. Thus, there is a black squiggly line at the top of each channel that can't be cropped out. It shows up in all my recordings too.

I wonder if the Eye TV has this same issue.

what???

[Gizzmonic]

Warning: watching Trigger Happy TV on the subway can be a bit dangerous; people think the abandoned aluminum foil hat under the bench belongs to you.

They think you are incredibly paranoid about mind control because you watch some shitty British import show? Please explain.

Re:what???

[Anonymous Coward]

I would explain, but answering questions is giving in to mind control at its most undisguised level.

In any case, they probably did not think this (though they would have been right if they did). The person on the subway I was making a comment about was probably you staring at me funny for watching a shitty British television show.

They're charging $200 for this?

[geekee]

Why not just get a video tuner card? That's all this thing is, plus whatever software they wrote to make it work like a TiVO

Re:They're charging $200 for this?

[Znonymous Coward]

Can you put cards into an iMac flat screen?

Re:They're charging $200 for this?

[gelstudios]

because the box captures straight to an mpeg stream, with a card you would need to crunch it on your comp.

Re:They're charging $200 for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes but you could crunch it to a proper divx.

Re:They're charging $200 for this?

[wadetemp]

You know of one that works with OSX for a reasonable price? I agree with you in spirit, but not in reality.

Re:They're charging $200 for this?

[geekee]

You can get a video capture card with mpeg-1 encoder for under $100.
http://store.yahoo.com/akidacomputer/mpegencar.htm l

Re:They're charging $200 for this?

[geekee]

Here's one that's cheap
http://store.yahoo.com/akidacomputer/mpegencar.htm l
Don't know if you can get MacOS X drivers though. Plus you need Freevo or something to do the tivo functions.

Re:Another Reason NOT to buy an Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, Unix is an obsolete platform?

Aw don't worry Steve. Lots of people will still buy Windows from you. And you'll still have lots of propellerheads to shout "developers developers developers!!" at. And don't worry...we'll still use Office X cuz it rocks.

Gee, a little antitrust problem and a killer OS from Apple and your bald head goes all sweaty. Calm yourself.

MPEG-2 PCI card for OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

A better alternative to EyeTV is available from the Japanese company Pixela. They sell a PCI capture card for Mac OSX featuring built-in TV tuner and s-video and composite inputs that captures in both MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 up to 12Mb/s at full DVD resolution 720x480. The english language page is at http://www.pixela.co.jp/en/press/captytv_pci.html

Re:MPEG-2 PCI card for OSX

[LordNimon]

It appears to be only available in Japan. A google search on "CaptyTV" reveals only Japanese web sites.

Re:MPEG-2 PCI card for OSX

[3liter914-6]

Checking out the website, they make versions of the PCI card for both Macs and PCs, in addition to a USB based (Mac&PC) MPEG1 *AND* MPEG2 hardware encoder. Looks like a neat unit, sells for about $200. The only drawback to these solutions is that Japanese TV tuners differ from US tuners, most only go up to about channel 12. MPEG2 encoding at 5Mbps takes ~38mb/minute, so you can fit about 2 hours on your standard DVD-R. MPEG2@4Mbps (31mb/min) MPEG1@2Mbps (13mb/min) and DV (240mb/min) are also available I may have to pick one of these up. Who wants fresh Anime DVDs?

IEEE-1396

[masonbrown]

Taken from the IEEE Project Status Page:

Designation: 1396
Sponsor: Computer Society/Microprocessors and Microcomputers
Title: Standard for Communication Bus (TELECOM Bus): Reference Models
Status: Withdrawn PAR. Standards project no longer endorsed by the IEEE.
Technical Contact: Gary A Nelson, Phone:708 304 0000, Email:gnelson@zynrgy.com
History: PAR APP: Mar 19, 1992
Project Scope: To provide a guide to the configurations and uses targeted for
the TELECOM Bus family of standards.
Project Purpose: To provide a firm background and overview to the environments
for which TELECOM Bus systems are envisioned.
Key Words: communication, bus, hybrid, switching, applications

oh boy.

[hrieke]

If the TV execs. hated Tivo and company, El Gato just became target number one.
It's one thing if the process to record TV is see as technically hard, but this thing will allow your mother to do it- and that's where the execs will start to worry. It's too simple...
I'm guessing that you can edit out the commericals, compile a season of a TV program and send it around the world in nothing flat.

Re:oh boy.

[Maskirovka]

This is nothig new. ATI's All in Wonder radeons have had this feature for some time.

I'm Going to TRY to make this clear For EVERYONE

[Anonymous Coward]

EyeTV uses a HARDWARE ENCODER, can you say hardware?

This device ENCODES and then sends the ENCODED mpeg1 video to the computer using usb at 1.2 megabytes per second.

Lets do some math:

if one hour of mpeg1 = 650 megs then:

650 / 60(mintutes) / 60(seconds) = 180555.6 bytes

you following me?

now the correct bandwidth that we need here is 180kBps. I think USB can handle that, don't you?

I hope we are all informed now, and i don't see anymore: "USB can't handle that" or "every USB tuner i've seen SUCKS"

cause its a HARDWARE ENCODER.

Thank you for your time.

[OT] Powermate "volume knob"

[Zagadka]

That's a paddle! A pretty cool looking USB paddle, but a paddle nonetheless.

Re:[OT] Powermate "volume knob"

[bogie]

Yes but its big and shiny, and people seem like big shiny knobs for some reason.

Re:[OT] Powermate "volume knob"

[margaret]

My boyfriend has one of those powermate knobs, but he got the special limited edition black knob. For some reason, this is better than the shiny silver knob. I really don't understand...

Dear el Slashdotto

[Anonymous Coward]

Before you el posto our URL on your sito, por favor, contacto nosotros, so we are el prepared-o when our web servero goes up in el smoke-o, and burns down half of el buildingo.

Sincerely,

El Presidento
El Gato

Re:Apple...

[milovoo]

What would you post instead?

(I'm serious - let's hear a real example)

Macs have more cool stuff, deal with it.

-milo

You don't need it.

[pantherace]

if you are building a linux box for PVR, use mencoder to capture DIRECTLY TO DIVX/MPEG4. Last night I captured an episode of smallville directly from cable, and it looks great.

CPU usage was about 50% on one cpu (800 MHz P3 (box is dual) filesize is 374.5MB (using default VBR mp3 and a vbitrate of 800 (default)) it can be reencoded to a lower bitrate and nearly the same quality if you turn vhq on (Very High Quality) in mencoder (note this is without commercials taken out (57 minutes, most shows are about 43 mins with them out so: about 280 MB with commercials edited out.

Box used: dual P3 800
256MB RAM
ATI TV Wonder VE (~$30 when I got it)
mplayer/encoder 0.90pre10
redhat 7.3

Command line used (or one that has been used, not sure this is the EXACT one I used for smallville):
mencoder -tv on:driver=v4l:width=320:height=240:input=0:norm=NT SC:outfmt=rgb32:freq=83.250 -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -o test6.avi

This comes with a disclaimer though, there isn't a nice frontend to recording to mplayer. freevo (freevo.sourceforge.net) is working on easy recording though.

Re:You don't need it.

[commanderfoxtrot]

You'll find nvrec much easier to use. I use it in conjunction with the ffmpeg MJPEG codec: I can capture at full PAL resolution easily in realtime -- on a 1GHz Duron! At smaller frame sizes (but larger than above post's) I can record two streams simultaneously.

I'm running a WinTV Nicam/Radio.

The only problem is that nvrec/ffmpeg don't like to record AVIs over 2gb... I think it's a current ffmpeg problem.

The main advantage of nvrec over ffmpeg/transcode/mencoder/mjpegtools for recording live TV is the near-perfect audio/video sync -- the other's just aren't up to the job yet.

Re:You don't need it.

[Anonymous Coward]

This a filesystem limitation, not inherent to the software.

Re:You don't need it.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no 2 GB file limitation in any common Linux filesystem (ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, or JFS). As long as you're using GLIBC 2.2, an application just needs to be compiled properly to support large files.

Re:You don't need it.

[commanderfoxtrot]

No, you're wrong. If you do some research into this subject, you'll find that normal AVIs have a 2gb limit. There are extensions that allow the filetype to hold 4GB.
This is not an issue with the filesystem.

Re:You don't need it.

[commanderfoxtrot]

the above post was supposed to be in reply to an anonymous coward who claimed the 2gb limit was due to the filesystem, and not enabling LFS.

Re:Ogg is important.

[Anonymous Coward]

0pen s0urce ru1ez!!!!!!

Re:Another Reason NOT to buy an Apple

[milovoo]

>Now look where the grass is greener, on the Windows
>PC you can get a PCI tuner card for less than $100
>bucks that will record your

Can I imply from this that you have never
actually done it? Try it, then try it on a
mac and see if you still think Mac is "obsolete".

-milo

Freevo! steals icons?

[bmwt]

woh- what's with freevo stealing mac icons? That cant be legal :)

WinTV PVR is like this, but...

[nicestepauthor]

I bought a Hauppage WinTV PVR which does for WinTel boxes what this does for the Mac. You can record in MPEG-1 (VCD) format or MPEG-2 at several different bitrates.

This works pretty well for watching recordings on the PC that you don't intend to keep. Forget it for making permanent copies to VCD or DVD though. High quality MPEG encoding can't be done in real time. You need to capture to some other format (MJPEG or Huffyuv) then convert to MPEG afterwards. MPEG compression for a two hour movie in VCD format can take almost 24 hours. Compressing to DivX is much faster and takes half the disk space, but cannot be played on most current DVD players.

In any case, VCDs created from MPEG captures using this card look OK on the computer, but really awful on a real TV. If VCDs for your TV is what you want get a cheaper card without MPEG encoding and use Virtual Dub, TMPGenc, etc. as described at vcdhelp.com.

Re:WinTV PVR is like this, but...

[MrResistor]

High quality MPEG encoding can't be done in real time.

Yes it can, and it has been done for a few years on a regular basis. Perhaps you mean it can't be done on a home system, and that's true. Don't say it can't be done, though, because I've got several machines converting video to 50Mbps MPEG in realtime in the room with me at this very moment.

A better solution....

[z-kungfu]

...is the studio/tv from formac. It's firewire so you can get much better throughput, and OSX.
http://www.formac.com/p_bin/?cid=solutions_conve rt ers_studiodvtv
It beats the EyeTV hands down.

Re:A better solution....

[SirOgre]

how does it beat EyeTV hands down?

Yes it is slightly better resolution....but is twice as expensive.

Firewire is a red herring here. The uncompressed cable signal isn't even as fast as 1.2 MB/sec, so "much better throughput" is irrelevant.

So what if the road can handle a thousand cars a day if there are only 20 cars in the city?

Don't get me wrong, I'd like the better resolution, but the formac device isn't *that* much better than EyeTV

Re:A better solution....

[Andy Smith]

Unfortunately the Studio is very low quality and suffers from bad colour shifting. I sent mine back within a couple of days. I use a Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge which does have one major problem, in that it suffers from environmental electrical interference and is therefore unstable, but the quality when it works is superb. Even with the instability I'd recommend it over the Studio without a doubt.

Hauppauge supports OS X

[Spencerian]

Hauppauge supports Mac OS X under their MyTV product line from their Eskape Labs division.

MacAddict recently did a review and comparison of EyeTV (which I also use) and MyTV. EyeTV was easier to use and had a stronger value in their opinion. I was waiting for MyTV to get its drivers out of its eternal beta stage by the time EyeTV showed up.

Re:Hauppauge supports OS X

[cygnus]

Hauppauge supports Mac OS X under their MyTV product line from their Eskape Labs division.

thanks! i was unaware of those products. but the PCI versions seem to be so much better, if only based on the resolutions... the WinTV PCI cards can take 1600x1200 stills!

Re:Hauppauge supports OS X

[Tumbleweed]

> the WinTV PCI cards can take 1600x1200 stills!

That's interesting - but what are they taking those nice 1600x1200 stills _from_? NTSC and PAL aren't anywhere NEAR that kind of resolution - not even CLOSE (like around 1/4 that resolution). So what they're really doing is taking the image and scaling it up. Shit, you could do that better in the GIMP or Photoshop, so that's hardly a big deal.

Re:Hauppauge supports OS X

[cygnus]

right right... but i think they support 800x600 or whatever dvd resolution is, don't they?

there *has* to be something out there better than this, anyway.

Re:Hauppauge supports OS X

[Tumbleweed]

I hate to break it to you, but DVD resolution is a whopping 480p (progressive) at best, and you only get that if you're watching on a computer or a _really_ expensive TV. (480p (as opposed to 480i - interlaced) DVD players are relatively cheap, now, but the tv's are still mondo pricey.

I just wish someone would come out with a widescreen TUBE tv that supports 480p with no speakers. No higher resolutions needed (what would I use them for?. Lowest-cost possible with a great picture for watching regular tv and DVD movies. Is this too much to ask for? *sigh*

Re:I'm Going to TRY to make this clear For EVERYON

[British]

Try getting video via the Intel Pro camera. It has an RCA port in it to capture anything(VCR, etc). Needless to say, the performance pales in comparison to my regular TV card due to USB limitations.

Now if it was USB 2, it would be a different story.

Sample

[Anonymous Coward]

Any owner care to post a short sample .mpg captured with the device? That would really help others to know if the quality of the video was acceptable.

UK Support ?

[rixster]

I've had a cursory look at the website and the comments so far but I can't see if it'd work in the UK (i.e. with PAL). Anybody got any references / success stories ??

Re:UK Support ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I emailed them when the product first came out. Seems they have tentative plans to provide a PAL version, likely contingent on how the NTSC version fares in the market. Don't know about a UK equivalent of the Titan web-based scheduler, though.

What I'd really like is a dual PAL/NTSC version, since the channels on my cable/satellite system use a real hodge-podge of TV systems.

Re:I'm Going to TRY to make this clear For EVERYON

[Anonymous Coward]

are you kidding me?

This is a joke right? did you READ anything I said?!?

Unless your video camera uses hardware encoding, then you have a point, and i really don't think you have a point.

Read before you reply please.

Editing can be easier than that

[SirOgre]

From EyeTV, export to quicktime movie.

then use this killer utility to split the file (at time intervals) and rejoin components.

Much easier than what you are doing, IMO. I've been recording Simpson's episodes for a month now and I delete the commericals from the file each night.

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac QWZX

[Anonymous Coward]

$59 DOLLARS FOR THOSE CHEAP PIECES OF CRAP???

Sheesh, I was just joking about the $300, but it might as well be, considering you can get a rock-solid IBM best-keyboard-in-the-world-hands-down for like $49.

I'll admit that Apple makes some decent products, but their keyboards have always been crap. I didn't realize that they were overpriced crap as well.

You do know...

[Anonymous Coward]

...you can customize /. so that you don't see stories about Apple and Mac?

Instead of trolling and getting modded down, spend your time finding good geeky stories about Dell or whatever it is you do like.

Dealmac thread:

[yunfat]

Hereis the dealmac discussion...

Re: Why no divx?

[eXtro]

My guess is that they're using a dedicated chip to do the MPEG1 encoding, and at the time of manufacture there were no dedicated DIVX/MPEG encoding chips, or none that were cost effective at least. Using dedicated chips like this cuts down on your time to market, and quite often the actual cost of the device. A microprocessor may be good for higher priced devices but not possible in lower cost devices.

Re:Apple...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they don't cover Dell because Dell doesn't INNOVATE?!? They take all of the hard work and research from companies such as HP, IBM, Apple, etc. that have led to the commoditizing of the PC as we know it today, then search for the lowest price on each of those commodity parts, sell you a cheapo system, then spend NO money on R&D!

"Dude, they're going to hell"

these things sux get a replay tv instead

[spicysquid]

I got one of these things for my winxp machine. A wintv-pvr 250. Damn thing was the buggiest piece of hardware I ever had. Crashed my machine every day, drivers were always unstable, scheduled shows would fail to run. If you want something that you sit there and manually control and reboot your system it works great. Not worth the 150 bux I spent on it, replay tvs are on sale at circuit city for 200 bux after rebates! This thing is a dream, records all your shows for you, you can even download straight to your computer, and burn as a svcd without any problems.

Re:these things sux get a replay tv instead

[killerz298]

That is true, but don't you have to pay a $250 activation fee on the ReplayTV unit as well as the other units? If the total cost was around $300 total I think I would do it, but $450 is just a bit too much to be worth it to me at this point.

Re:Apple...

[Mirkon]

It's not Slashdot's fault that Macs are more efficient, interesting, and attractive than Windoze machines. But seriously, what other company makes both computer hardware and operating systems? (I suppose you could say Microsoft if you count the Xbox as a computer... but that's another story)

Re:Apple...

[pretentiousPPC]

So when was the last time you went to Apple's website? I don't see any resemblance to any thing at Apple. Although I could just be drinking too much of the kool-aid, and thinking that nothing can be as good as the mother ship.

Re:I'm Going to TRY to make this clear For EVERYON

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think I understand correctly...
It's a hardware what????

Re:Great, except I don't want to make a Mac QWZX

[objekt]

Why are you using Internet Explorer?

*shakes head*

[Tokerat]

I'm sorry, did you READ the comment you replied to? No?

Probably for the same reason you bought an Intel Pro USB Camera?

Hauppauge

[Andy Dodd]

All of their WinTV PCI products (Except the PVR ones) work under Linux and have for many (>5) years. I have one of their original Wincast/TV boards and it works beautifully under Linux (although I usually use Windows for TV because of DScaler, the deinterlacers available for Linux need a bit more polish.)

The PVR ones work somewhat - The drivers under Linux allow you to watch TV just like a non-PVR card, but don't support the onboard MPEG encoder yet.

The USB PVR model also works for composite video.

I fail to see how this article is anything but a Slashvertisement... Devices that offer higher quality than this USB1 piece of junk have been available for over 5 years. It's all about PCI or Firewire, USB (1.1 or 2.0) is inherently unsuited to video (It can't guarantee uninterrupted data, so there's nothing preventing dropouts.)

OSS cool

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem being that, in the end, you end up with a copy of Smallville.

But cool that there are solutions for those of us in the OpenSource world. MacOS X is fine, but it's just another proprietary Unix (ok, with "OSS underpinnings"). Until I can do a "cvs update" of the Operating System followed by "make build", it doesn't count.

(so where can I get a CVS of the -current of a Linux distro?)

-BSDBoy

Re:OSS cool

[Anonymous Coward]

reply to "(so where can I get a CVS of the -current of a Linux distro?)"
http://cvs.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/ there is a cvs interface too its easier to give you the web interface.

Bah

[Andy Dodd]

Hardware encoding = much better than raw video. But it still sucks, it's only MPEG1 not MPEG2, and MPEG1 isn't that hot.

This ripoff device can't come close to my 5-year-old Hauppauge WinCast/TV which I got for half the price back then.

Since you keep posting....

[Anonymous Coward]

...and posting and posting!!! to Mac stories, User956 must be a secret fan. Maybe even one of us "fag hairdressers" mentioned in one of your earlier, oh-so-intelligent posts?

So please be inspired, as well as titillated, by this QuickTime video where James Bondjumps off a building with his Titanium PB case. That is, take a flying leap, why don't you?

Re:Since you keep posting....

[sharrestom]

Pierce Brosnan needs to take a flying leap to another job. He's become unwatchable as Bond. I say give Clive Owen the 007 spot for awhile.

Re:Apple...

[Anonymous Coward]

More science and space articles. A lot more.

And ghost stories.

Nothing special

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing special - there is a lot of USB units like this. And they are much cheaper - as low as $50.
I personally wait for cheap firewire/USB 2.0
units which offer higher resolution. The resolution
of this gadget is quite pathetic. 300x200 ...
Cheap $150 720x480 NTSC/PAL firewire or USB 2.0 unit - this will be the news! This one is
years behind.

Re:Apple...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Dell is about 1/11 as interesting as Apple.

Toast and support suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Toast 5 Titanium quit working with a Que! CDRW that worked fine on 4 - at least they finally fixed a long standing UPC code problem. After 45+ minutes on hold on a toll call, they were cluelessly poking around for 1/2 hour or more. They still haven't fixed it after a few more phone calls.

Cheesy CD creator on the PC side is about as bad.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF????

MOD UP

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true, that company is shooting themselves in the foot.

Oh! I get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're retarded.

no subtitles

[ericf]

EyeTV doesn't capture subtitles. I'd buy one if it weren't for this. I wrote to inquire when/if they'd be enhancing the product to address this shortcoming and got no response, which is never a good sign for a consumer product company.

imply vs. infer

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you can't IMPLY anything from the previous poster. You can INFER, however...

The previous poster did all the implying. I don't know why this concept is so hard for people to understand.

It would be good

[Anonymous Coward]

if everyone would just stick to bits per second, and not talk about bytes at all. It's non standard, adn not appropriate when talking about data transmission.. all it does is add confusion... especially when you start deciding whether or not to use proper metric prefixes.

The proper methodology for discussing transmission rates is to speak in bits per second, and proper metric prefixes in base 10 (Kilo = 1000, etc)

Re:imply vs. infer, loose/lose, to/too ...

[milovoo]

yup, I thought about that, but I was
too lazy to look it up (yup, too lazy to
move the mouse and type a few keys)

Since most people (and some major publications)
can't manage that whole loose / lose thing, i've
decided to just let it all slide grammar-wise.
Why should I worry about it? You knew what I meant,
and next year it will probably be an alternate
definition in the dictionary.

sloppy thinking, it's the way of the future,
might as well join up now.

-milo

Re: Mac is obsolete in this "area"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not the one who wrote the the first message, but I am one that can speak from experience. I've tried it, and the USB 1.1 style device leaves much to be desired, much like all USB TV do on any platform.

I also have a Hauppage WinTV-PVR 250 and a Creative Digital VCR. I have EPG guides for both of them, and for the most part they are on par with my Tivo. In one way they are actually better, they enable me to capture video to SVCD and Divx on the cheap. Along with DVD-RW or DVD+RW standards, an option that is still to expensive on the TV.

I have a friend who put together a fairly nice PC with a 2.5GHz Processor, 512mb of RAM, and dual 120gig 5400 (noise/heat issue related), along with a CDrw at 48x12x48 and a Sony DVD-/+RW Drive for around $1100. It does run Windows XP, it would be nice to see it under Linux or some port of BSD, but it serves it purpose. On the fly jukebox, dvd player, and personal video recorder.

I haven't tried this. I only run mine from my bedroom. It has all of the same features, but only a 20" LCD wide panel display. This is mainly due to the fact that I have a Tivo already. The little PowerPC Linux box was a mircle of time some years ago.

Re: Mac is "obsolete" in this area

[milovoo]

Yes, I agree that USB devices would suck for this,
but my Sony DVMC works great on firewire. I don't
use it for the discussed purpose, but only because
I don't need to (I can't think of any TV that's worth
saving as a DV stream (well, farscape maybe) but
it could save in MPEG format as well)

I imagine that just about any platform could get some
sort of timed video-in working, and from looking at the
prices you listed, it's at least as expensive on
the PC, and you have to look at that crappy UI.

-milo

Re:just curious

[Dekonstructor]

Hello!! I am very much wanting to make MMORPG gaming good too. Damaged Studios: Living the future of the future of MMORPG.

and be a slashdot editor as well.

Can you help???

Windows support is coming...

[Slur]

...but not Linux. There was an interview with a guy from El Gato on the "Your Mac Life" radio show a week or two ago, and they said they were working on the Windows software.

Poor product

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought one of these, and returned it the next day. The quality was very poor, the image was grainy, and the colors were washed out. I assumed it would be at least as good as NTSC video, but I get a MUCH better picture on just a standard VCR recording (EP with a much used tape).

In general, I have found the software PVRs for PCs don't compare to a VCR, much less dedicated hardware PVRs like TiVo.

Re:Apple...

[evldhs]

> But seriously, what other company makes both computer hardware and operating systems?

Milan?
SUN ?
IBM ?
HP/Compaq ?
Amiga ?

And probably many more. Apple doing both an OS and hardware is nothing exeptional. It's common.

Re:Apple...

[Anonymous Coward]

thats precisely i don't want to buy a mac. why shut yourself up from the rest of the world?
btw apple ditched their own os, os x is unix.
now hail the real king of all OSes.

Hollywood Bridge problems

[emaq123]

I use one of these also and have had problems with it 'disconnecting' from the mac. I saw it as an input voltage problem and have taken steps to make sure it had good power. ie: different circuit in house, ups, etc. It is pretty reliable now but I'm still trying to get it to work better. I'm looking at swapping the power supply for a higher quality model and also would like to test it with a 'continuous duty' ups to see if that helps.

Have you come up with anything to make these things work better?