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EFF Reviews HDTV PVR Solution for Mac
enrico_suave points out this "PVRBlog post about EFF's Review of Elgato's EyeTV 500, an HDTV solution for the Mac. Well, a very speedy dual-processor G5 Mac, apparently. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been doing a lot of important work defending our online and digital rights including opposing the dreaded FCC mandated broadcast flag (cue boos and hisses) Elgato and Plextor also have a Standard Definition homebrew PVR solution with an EyeTV and ConvertX PVR bundle (Wired review)." (See also this earlier review from a Slashdot reader.)
This may sound as troll, but hear me out:
Times have changed since the days when VCRs were introduced. Back then, we had a few channels to choose from, and even fewer good programs. E.g., there were 2 or 3 sci-fi shows a week and if they were shown at the wrong timeslot you were SOL. Worse, video rentals hadn't been invented and tapes of TV shows even less. So back then, recording TV shows for time-shifting was quite useful.
Nowadays, the good shows come out on DVDs which you can rent from the corner store or through the net, and the not-so-good shows, well it's not the end of life if you miss one or two episodes. So there's really not so much urgency to time-shift. Furthermore, we're moving away from the one-way TV, using the internet and interactive entertainment more and more, which is good.
The broadcast flag will make it harder for us to watch TV. This'll force us to move away from TV even more, move away from commercials and the social pressure of watching certain "must-see" shows. It'll force us to be more picky about the shows we watch (through DVDs) and open the market to independent shows released on DVDs only. So while this will have a serious effect on the life of some people, it'll be a good effect in the long run.
Have the P4 or AMD do it in software and it'll take you to a dual or very powerful single processor.
THe only reason (which you would have found out if you read the article) it requires a Dual G5 for SMOOTH playback is because Apple decided to be stupid and keeps the MPEG2 hardware playback API private so that they have to do the decoding in software and not hardware like a normal Intel based system can.
Its not a hardware issue at all, but a simple OS design issue. One of the very few places where OS X actually fails compared to Linux or Windows.
Right, just like MS's HD WMV takes a P4 3GHz CPU to decode their HD content in software.
Put it out to graphics hardware and it takes basically no CPU cycles. This should change in Tiger, where all of the graphics sub system is going to be hardware accellerated, including video playback.
I'm somewhat interested whether playback using Apple's QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component makes a significant difference here. It's only $30 CDN ($19.95 US -- I guess they haven't changed their pricing since the Canadian dollar gained on the US dollar), and doesn't require QuickTime Pro, so I imagine a non-dual G5 user who wanted to use this system to watch their captured video could just buy this.
I'm tempted to buy this to test it out and post the results here. Does anyone here have the MPEG-2 playback add-on for QuickTime who can comment on this?
Yaz.
I hope people don't take your casual claims as anything authoritative on the subject. Have you tried to "just build an HDTV capable MythTV setup"? If you follow the discussion on AVS forum of people trying to use the only linux HDTV board you might not be so sanguine about your prospects. The EyeTV product is priced higher than I'd like but once you purchase it you'll have something that just works.
I've used their USB product for a while and it uses the same software. It is much less finicky than the corresponding HDTV software I have for my PC.