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Review: Elgato EyeTV 500
The package is simple. The 500 comes with the box itself, which is slightly larger in all dimensions than a paperback book; an IR remote control and batteries; a CD; a quick-start card; and a standard 6-wire FireWire cable. The back of the box has antenna-in and -out jacks (the purpose for the antenna-out jack is unknown. As delivered, it has a plastic cover on it), two FireWire jacks and a DC power input jack (there is no power supply, um, supplied, and DC power input is optional. They do not recommend you plug bus-powered devices into it if the EyeTV device itself is bus-powered). The front panel has a window with the IR remote control receiver and a status LED. The box is light for its size and liberally perforated with ventilation holes, but in extended use I couldn't detect any heat.
The installation procedure is simplicity itself: You connect an antenna to the antenna jack, you connect the FireWire cable between your computer and the box, you insert the CD into your computer and drag the EyeTV application from the CD to your Applications folder (or anywhere else you want it). The first time you start the EyeTV application, you'll get a setup wizard that will ask about your EyeTV hardware, discover it, and begin the auto-tune procedure.
This is the first place that EyeTV stumbles ever so slightly: The purpose of the auto-tune procedure is to fill in the channel list used for the channel up and down buttons and for the channel list drop-down menu. It takes a couple of minutes to complete, but the first time I did it, the EyeTV missed a station that I knew it should have found. When I repeated the procedure, it found that one, but missed a different one. Finally, the third try yielded 28 streams (I have a good outdoor antenna in Santa Clara, CA, aimed at the Mt. Sutro tower). Elgato should add some way of manually adding or deleting channels (I don't really care about non-English language and home shopping channels).
The other thing to keep in mind is that this receiver is designed strictly for over-the-air reception, and for good reception, you'll very likely need a good outdoor antenna. If you get cable TV, then this isn't for you.
The software integrates well with TitanTV.com, which provides program-guide information. You can click on shows on the TitanTV web site and watch the EyeTV tune to the correct channel or set up to record the show. Recording shows is more or less on a timed schedule basis - it's not quite up to the standard of a TiVo season pass. But the software does poll Titan for schedule changes (if you allow it).
Once you've recorded a show, an iMovie-like editor lets you locate the commercials and cut them out, although the job of finding and marking them is a manual procedure. Once you've marked them, you can compact the show, which permanently removes the marked sections, reclaiming the disk space they were taking.
And speaking of disk space, the CPU and hard disk requirements for digital TV content are enormous. 1080i shows can take potentially 20 GB per hour. An episode of CSI:Miami, after being compressed to 41 minutes, takes 11 GB. A 41-minute episode of The Tonight Show takes 8. Simply displaying these streams at full size in a window takes about 75% of the available CPU of my wife's 1.6 GHz single-proc G5. I wouldn't recommend buying one of these for a machine less powerful than that. The software will scale the image down if it needs to, so it won't outright fail on lesser hardware (and you will be able to access multicasted streams), but the big selling point of this box is being able to watch 1080i shows at full size on your 23" cinema display. If you want to do that, you'll need some serious processor muscle.
All in all, I give this product a big thumbs-up. Digital TV will truly revolutionize broadcast television over the course of the next few years just the way color did for our parents and grandparents. At $299, the EyeTV 500 is a great way for Mac owners to get started without spending a lot, but still enjoying all of the benefits (and breathtaking pictures) Digital TV has to offer.
Thanks to nsayer for this review. Have an interesting review in mind? Slashdot welcomes feature-length submissions.
Antenna out is for the rest of your boxes, you insensitive clod!
But seriously, though - your source should go to your primary recorder, then out to any other inline devices, then to your tv. That way you get the best signal into the recorder.
For instance, You'd go from source, to the eyeTV, to your VHS recorder, to your projector, then to your regular TV, were you to have all those things.
My curiousity is this whole "but not with cable" thing. Just how does it block that?
kulakovich
except it's Mac only. I love Firewire but for some reason people who produce Firewire products like to make them Mac only, excluding about 80% of the potential audience.(PC's are about 95% of the audience but quite a few don't have Firewire).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
For the nonce, this solution seems to be functional. Get the firewire enabled video box, record into DV compatible tool, and away you go.
It was h.264, it's different. h.263 is used in video-telephony and old MPEG1 at very low resolutions.
Anyway I think that if the Elgato software supports exporting via quicktime (very likely) and you have MacOS X Tiger, it is very possible to do what you are talking about.
h.264 has HDTV resolution transparency at 8 Mbps, so a 41 minute episode of CSI:Miami would take 2.5 GB.
giandrea
If you have a modern digital cable box with Firewire outputs, just download iRecord and connect your Mac to the box with a quality firewire cable. iRecord is developing quickly into a good PCPVR solution for digital cable boxes.
The interesting thing is that you can record anything the box is showing over the firewire output, including video on demand, HDTV, Music Choice, and digital-tier cable channels.
You can then take the captured MPEG2 transport stream and convert it to a standard MPEG file by using VLC's advanced output options in the file open dialog.
Now if someone can figure out how to send the MPEG transport stream back to the digital cable box for playback...
A few months ago, I stumbled upon this page which explains how to record and play back HDTV signals using free tools and a cable box.
:/
Regarding playback, VLC can *just* manage to play back HD 1080i recordings on my 1GHz TiBook (using the OpenGL playback option), so it sounds like it does not require the gargantuan system specs stated in the above article.
Now if only we could recieve HDTV in the UK.
Here's a working link. HDTV to a Mac
Check out
AVS Forum - Mac HD PVR
and
Some interesting software
If you have a cable box with a firewire port (most HD cable boxes have them, and if yours does not then you can get one from the cable company as there is a law saying that it must be available to you - at least that's what I have been told and the cable company agreed)... Anyway, it works pretty well.. Have fun.
Why can't it record off of cable? Does cable use different frequencies for the same channels or something? I thought they were the same...
Modern TVs can tune both cable and over-the-air stations in a similar manner, and certain cable and air stations share the same frequencies, but not all.
This device is designed for tuning and recording digital (including HDTV) stations. To get these, you need an over-the-air antenna.
Digital cable comes in a variety of flavors, depending on your cable provider. There is no easy way for Elgato to support these. (And there may even be legal issues as some digital cable boxes have bizzare authentication systems).
(link to previous critically acclaimed post).
It doesn't sound nearly as elegant as the ElGato solution -- they make good stuff -- but for a quick n' dirty geek HDTV recording hack, the example code Apple provides actually does work.
~jeff
The biggest problem right now with the HDTV stand-alone recorder boxes and computer HDTV tuners is that they cannot record from digital cable. Digital Cable uses QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) which means that it generates 4 bits out of one baud for encoding HDTV channels. Cracking that is the holy grail of HDTV recording and there are many users out there willing to put up lots of cash as an incentive for this happen. The point is over-the-air (OTA) HDTV is unencrypted and can be recorded for the time being using both stand-alone and computer equipment. Both satellite-based and digital cable-based HDTV use either QAM64 or QAM256 which cannot be tuned well by any equipment out today. There was a Dish 5000 reciever that could be hacked to output HDTV digital streams over firewire but the modulation on the network has changed so the box cannot decrypt the streams anymore for output. I would suggest waiting for the time being.
To qualify the above statement, DViCO makes the Fusion HDTV QAM PCI card for desktops which unofficially claims to tune QAM256 but it still has problems with QAM64. Link A simple seach at the AVS Forums should provide more information on current issues with the card. Lastly, for you laptop PC owners out there, Sasem makes a USB HDTV tuner which claims to tune QAM but is really only useful for OTA HDTV at the moment. Link ATI will be releasing an HDTV card soon but I am not aware if it has any QAM tuning abilities.
http://features.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11440 1&cid=9697669
Distributed, multi-channel recordings are very nice. If you have multiple PCs, you can also do distributed TV watching (watch a recorded program on a PC other than the one which recorded it).
MythTV also has the cool feature where, if all the encoder cards on your current PC are busy recording shows (which means that you can't watch something else), MythTV will transparently use another encoder on another PC, and stream that output to your current PC. Sehr cool.
Unfortunately, MythTV can be a royal pain to install and configure. The easiest approach is to use something canned like KnoppMyth, but the current version (R4V4.1) still needs a fair amount of hacking/tweaking to work with high-quality encoding cards like the Hauppauge PVR-250 or PVR-350. Still, it's better than starting from scratch.
Have you seen the pcHDTV (HD-2000) tuner card?
It is <$200, and is Linux-only! Many are making a decent HDTV system using it...
ElGato just released version 1.5 today that lowers CPU requirements for HDTV playback. I read reports of dual 866 G4 being able to play back a full 1080i stream.
The review was vague about being able to receive standard VHF and UHF over the air broadcasts. The online documentation also doesn't specifically indicate that it can receive them. And no Cable input? I mean come on, how is that useful. All the PCI based solutions provide dual antenna inputs. I could understand the lack of Cable based HDTV, but it should at least allow you to record and play standard def cable.
Because:
A) This is a HDTV recorder, it does do *digital* SD, but all of the streams are simply dumped in RAW MPEG2 off of the decoder chip. There is no onboard transcoder chip that could re-encode that stream to DV on the fly, and it would be useless to downsample all the HDTV resolution streams to DV as it wouldn't be HD anymore.
B) Transcoding RAW MPEG2 to DV in software is way slower than realtime, and would actually INCREASE the amount of space required to store the information by a lot.
C) The RAW MPEG2 stream can conceivably be dumped directly to DVHS, or piped to the FireWire port on an HDTV (Mitsubishi, Sony, etc...) Try doing that with DV.
If you want to use iMovie, no one is stopping you. You can transcode it yourself. In order to record in DV you would have to give up the ability to watch TV in realtime, or they would have to invest in a onboard chip to do the transcoding (think thousands of dollars per box.) So that's why.
By the way, there are FireWire *standard* definition Tuner units for the Mac that record in Native DV, but again this is HD.
The Austrialian/European version of EyeTV for digital over-the-air TV (DVB-T standard) doesn't convert the video format at all - it "just" singles out one MPEG2 stream from all those transmitted and sends it over to be saved on the Mac's HD.
My guess is that the HDTV version works the same way. Re-encoding the material on the fly would probably be too processor intensive, so it's easier to have a simple editor built into the software. Besides: iMovie is pretty self-contained. It wants its own project files,etc. For simple editing, you'd want something like QuickTime Pro, which can edit a single file without all the hassles iMovie puts you through. And, basically, EyeTV's editor feels almost like QuickTime Pro (a bit better with the thumbnails and such) but it comes with the device and is integrated into the recording and scheduling software whereas QuickTime Pro costs extra money and is an external application.
If you really need to do some iMovie tricks with your recordings, I'm sure there's a way to turn them into a DV stream, but most poeple won't want to do that, so I think it's wise they don't force users to create an iMovie project just to edit out some simple commercials - EyeTV's own editor does that just fine.