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

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"?

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

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

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: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)

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.

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.

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.