[MW Forums]

DVRs, such as the ubiquitous TiVo and even those nameless boxes that many cable companies provide, have changed the way we record and watch TV. While they do a great job of time-shifting your favorite TV programs, DVRs either tether you to your TV or require extracting and converting content for other uses. But with a Mac-based DVR and a little know-how, you can watch shows on your beautiful Apple Cinema Display. more

[Schneb]

I have the EyeTV Hybrid using the EyeTV software, and it works great. However, upgrading to EyeTV 2 has generated frame skipping when viewing HD video with movement. I have reported this to Elgato. In fact, when previewing the software, I warned them about this. They basically said, "Gee, doesn't do it for us." and now they have released it.
Make sure you save your old copy of EyeTV before replacing it with the new. You may end up regretting it.

[hexor]

Even though I don't use this I'd like to complement the author on a well done informative article.

[mmmdoughnuts]

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Even though I don't use this I'd like to complement the author on a well done informative article.

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If the author thinks that EyeTV is the best software, I think he is sadly mistaken. It is the worst interface ever. Using the software on a 1080i screen, the font is unusable for managing channel selection and recorded files when viewing from anything further from the screen than 1 foot.
It is a total pain trying to trick the tuning feature to get the faint channels. Many HD stations in my area require a directional antenna and you can only program the channels with a single pass. It is all or nothing. You have to do some crazy dancing to move the antenna as the EyeTV searches for stations to get them all. If you could only add channels manually, this would be a non issue. This has been a FEATURE since the first version and has been the biggest complaint. Elgato refuses to acknowledge the issue.
There is no feed back for your recording list to tell you if you have enough room to record the programs. It will not warn you about your lack of free space on the disk until it has aborted and stopped recording in the middle of the program.
EyeTV may be the best; but it is because it is the only one out there that can pretend to be a DVR replacement.
Basically, it far from GF friendly and god forbid my mother from using it.

[JScott]

Informative article Chris. More than anything I think it shows how complex the process is to have flexibility with content. The Elgato products are really nice but it seems there are too many parts and pieces you have to cobble together to get a good solution. I'd like to see the computer taken out of the equation and have a Tivo-like box that sits at the TV level of my entertainment chain. It would have a DVR and a built in encoder with choices for how you want to encode the video (ipod, iphone, other devices, etc), and it would be networked. Once a show was encoded you could copy them to your devices or better yet, it would generate an rss feed that you could subscribe to with iTunes. A setup like this would give you maximum flexibility with minimal effort. This is what the Apple TV should be.
I guess now I should ask. Is there a device out there that does this?

[GrahamAJones]

Hi mmmdoughnuts,

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If the author thinks that EyeTV is the best software, I think he is sadly mistaken. It is the worst interface ever. Using the software on a 1080i screen, the font is unusable for managing channel selection and recorded files when viewing from anything further from the screen than 1 foot.

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I'm a little confused... are you taking advantage of the "full screen" interface? The "EyeTV Programs" window would be hard to see on a large screen, but using full screen mode, we have a 22" monitor about 15 feet away from us and have no problems viewing the font.

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If you could only add channels manually, this would be a non issue.

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I am again confused... it is not well documented, but you can absolutely add channels manually. If you have your channels view open, click on the gear box and you can access an "Add channel manually" option.

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There is no feed back for your recording list to tell you if you have enough room to record the programs. It will not warn you about your lack of free space on the disk until it has aborted and stopped recording in the middle of the program.

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True, but you can easily get around this by just watching your disk space, and/or by getting a bigger hard drive. Disk drives have never been cheaper -- you can find a 500GB drive for around $120 these days.

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Basically, it far from GF friendly and god forbid my mother from using it.

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My wife can barely use a VCR, but now that EyeTV has introduced the full screen interface, she has no problems using EyeTV to set up recordings and manage playback. I dare say that it is easier than most VCRs, and even some DVRs.
Being a developer of the iEye Captain software program for the last couple of years, I am very close to the EyeTV community... my guess is that either you haven't made full use of the full screen mode, and/or your needs are not reflective of the typical EyeTV user.
Also, the EyeTV development team is VERY aggressive at bringing new features in, and while they may not give you a timetable for when your requests will be incorporated, they keep a list of virtually everything suggested, and continually add user requests to the app. The latest update is a perfect example... users have been requesting being able to record from the live buffer, and now it is a feature of the app.
Try the "full screen" mode -- I am very confident you will change your mind about the software.
- Graham Jones,
Developer,
iEye Captain for EyeTV.

[tallscot]

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DVRs, such as the ubiquitous TiVo and even those nameless boxes that many cable companies provide, have changed the way we record and watch TV. While they do a great job of time-shifting your favorite TV programs, DVRs either tether you to your TV or require extracting and converting content for other uses. But with a Mac-based DVR and a little know-how, you can watch shows on your beautiful Apple Cinema Display. <a href="/2007/09/features/now_gearup/index.php">[more]</a>

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If anything, this is a giant ad for not doing this. It's way too complex and limited. The other thing this article tells me is Apple is not offering consumers what they really want. Microsoft is, of course. If you are going to have a dedicated computer just for DVR, you might as well get a Windows Media Center PC. But we are Mac users and that means we'll put aluminum foil on our heads just to use the Mac, if we have to. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

[jerryg]

How about SageTV? http://sage.tv/
It runs on Windows, Linux and OS X.

[Schneb]

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it is not well documented, but you can absolutely add channels manually. If you have your channels view open, click on the gear box and you can access an "Add channel manually" option.

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Yes, you are right that it is not well documented. I had to contact them to figure out how to do this. And yes, you can put in the exact frequency you want accordingly. I really think they made this ability unintuitive.

[Luis_Alejandro]

Anyone with experience in PAL tuners?
Thanks in advance.

[hayesk]

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If anything, this is a giant ad for not doing this. It's way too complex and limited. The other thing this article tells me is Apple is not offering consumers what they really want. Microsoft is, of course. If you are going to have a dedicated computer just for DVR, you might as well get a Windows Media Center PC. But we are Mac users and that means we'll put aluminum foil on our heads just to use the Mac, if we have to. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

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I'm actually not sure that many users want this. I've never met anyone with a Media Center PC. And all the reviews I've read online give it less than stellar reviews.

[montgomery_burns]

I am disappointed that there are no internal PCI Express tuners for the Mac. What good is having all those slots in the Power Mac G5 and Mac Pro if companies don't make products that use them? I would rather install multiple tuner cards inside the Mac Pro than have a bunch of USB tuners hanging out of it. Here is one example of a PCI Express HDTV tuner for Windows PC's:
http://www.aver.com/mpd/combopcie.html
Does the EyeTV software support this card?

[mmmdoughnuts]

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I'm a little confused... are you taking advantage of the "full screen" interface? The "EyeTV Programs" window would be hard to see on a large screen, but using full screen mode, we have a 22" monitor about 15 feet away from us and have no problems viewing the font.

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No, the full screen mode is crippled compared to the regular "iTunes" interface, sorry but that is being to generous a description. This interface is the one that cannot be read on either display from far away. I guess I am lucky in that my second monitor is my 1080i screen and my desktop has a 24" Cinema Display. At the minimum, be able to change the font size of the window and my complaint will diminish.

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If you could only add channels manually, this would be a non issue.

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I am again confused... it is not well documented, but you can absolutely add channels manually. If you have your channels view open, click on the gear box and you can access an "Add channel manually" option.

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Yes and no. The manual mode must have a different thresh hold for accepting tuning. There has to be a valid TV station on that frequency to be added to the list. When I autotune with the software it finds it fine, but when I manually add it, the channel is rejected as not being a channel. So it may be there, but it doesn't always work and for me it never does.

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There is no feed back for your recording list to tell you if you have enough room to record the programs. It will not warn you about your lack of free space on the disk until it has aborted and stopped recording in the middle of the program.

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True, but you can easily get around this by just watching your disk space, and/or by getting a bigger hard drive. Disk drives have never been cheaper -- you can find a 500GB drive for around $120 these days.

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Spoken like a true developer of software company that doesn't listen. You should have just said it is your fault. When an hour of 1080i is 6GB, I can fill up 30-50 GB in a week. I use this as a DVR so I can watch when I want to watch, which is usually on the weekends. I'll save up a few hours of TV over a week and come in a find that on Thursday it missed the last half of the weeks shows. This is not the fault of the user when it would be very easy to be prompted or reminded that the requested recording list is going to over flow the free space.

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Basically, it far from GF friendly and god forbid my mother from using it.

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My wife can barely use a VCR, but now that EyeTV has introduced the full screen interface, she has no problems using EyeTV to set up recordings and manage playback. I dare say that it is easier than most VCRs, and even some DVRs.

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There is the rub, my computer is still a computer, Full screen mode is for dedicated watching machines. I don't have that luxury. It has to do double duty.
And I didn't even get a chance to rant about the downloading of program information from Titan TV. What a terrible database interface that site is. Some weeks my PBS station is included and some times not. I have contacted Elgato and Titan and I get canned answers from both. They should let us use yahoo or ghasp MSN tv listings. Titian is terrible.
I think anyone currently developing software could build a better interface really quick. This one is a real mixed bag. Some features like Full screen are very Tivo like for simplicity, but the rest including configuration is boarder line shameful.

[leicaman]

What I'd like to see is something I can put a cablecard into and it will control channel selection and record HD video, like the TiVO HD. But then I have an HDTV, so I suppose I might as well just get a TiVO HD. Just as soon as they have a special to transfer my TiVO II lifetime subscription to the TiVO HD, I'm there! /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif