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

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

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.

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: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.