HDTV Comes to the Mac

konfoo writes "Elgato just announced the availability of their FireWire DTV ATSC receiver (ATSC is the USA standard for digital and high definition television), EyeTV 500, at a price of around $350. It can be used in tandem with TitanTV to get EPG data and pick shows to record. Now Mac owners too can view and record those hidef broadcasts. On a sidenote, lets hope that the broadcast flag and other efforts don't squelch cool new products such as this." We reviewed the original EyeTV USB a year and a half ago. Since then, their product line has expanded, with all other models sporting FireWire, and covering a variety of analog and digital TV sources.

Comments

thumbs up to El Gato!

[jdbo]

While I can only testify to the effectiveness of their USB recorder, I feel the need to give a big thumbs-up to the company that has made my TV watching both more efficient and enjoyable.

At some point in my theoretically $-solvent future I plan to upgrade to one of the FW-based options, and the HDTV version looks pretty schweet. :)

That said, particular "advanced" options I'd like to see in the EyeTV software (which is fundamentally similar in interface across hardware versions) include some degree of automated commercial-marking/trimming for archived programs, either based on templates (many shows commonly feature commericals at consistent breakpoints during the broadcast, which obviously lends itself to a template-based solution), or recognition of particular image(s) (many networks use consistent "bumpers", which can be used (via image-recognition) to mark the beginning and end-points of commercials.

Given a chunk of time it's possible that I could put something like this together on my own (yay for EG using standards-based video!), but given the current success of their interface efforts, I'm confident that any set-up which they integrate would be superior to any external hack.

DIY HDTV on your Mac

[djupedal]

check it out....not for the meek - all you need is a Comcast HD box w/FireWire and a smattering of developer apps...oh, and considerable hard drive space wouldn't be a bad idea either :)

Re:g5 only

[foidulus]

Elgato makes other, more affordable models that hook up through USB or firewire. While you may not be able to make the highest quality recordings(which would require some cpu power to avoid loss), you can still get decent quality. If you have a powermac g4, you can also look at this, which has the added advantage that you can play console games on it, well you theoretically can with the external devices, but because there is a 1.5 second delay from when the source comes in to when it displays(which doesn't matter much for tv) playing games might not be much fun.

My Idea, mod up please :-)

[MacFury]

My idea is to provide an online database of a shows total duration and the when and how long the commercials are. This is communicates with a client video player. When the client records a tv show, meta data is stored about the shows channel, time it was broadcast and show name.

A user can then watch the show and mark when commercials begin and end. This information is sent to the server's database.

That data is then available to everyone who has recorded that show. They can choose to skip over previsouly defined commercials or watch the entire recorded video stream.

It would have to have a decent userbase to be useful, but I've seen worse ideas come to life. :-)

Already Done

[Glendale2x]

I've been doing this for about a year already; with existing hardware. Firewire to Mits TV and I'm recording. Works with any FireWire enabled HDTV tuner out there.

ATI HDTV PCI Card

[jo42]

Eh?

Why doesn't ATI simply write some Mac OS X drivers for the HDTV Wonder...? After all, they know how to write video drivers - how hard could it be?