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Review: EyeTV
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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