Elgato Systems EyeTV 500 Digital Media Streamer (10020511)
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- Type: Digital Media Streamer
- Usage: Music, Movies
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HDTV on a Mac is a joy to behold
Pros
Excellent video quality, user-friendly software
Cons
No wake-up capabilities, dual G5 required for full-screen HD playback
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Great HDTV solution for Macs. Get yours before the broadcast flag mandate hits!
I had previously reviewed the EyeTV 200 on Epinions, and panned it. I eventually traded it for a Formac StudioTV, which converts analog SDTV to DV, rather than MEPG2.
I have no such reservations about the EyeTV 500, which is an excellent product. All HDTV gear will soon be required to implement the so-called broadcast flag, which allows content providers to block you from making recordings for your own use (see the EFF web site www.eff.org for more information), and I wanted to have a unit without this restriction, before the deadline. There are HDTV tuner cards for Linux, but my primary machine is a Mac, and the only really viable solution is the EyeTV 500.
The physical unit itself is a light gray plastic box the size of a paperback book. It connects to your Mac using Firewire 400. A nice touch, it is bus-powered, to reduce cable clutter. It does not have the heat build-up problems of the EyeTV 200. A remote control is supplied, which is quite nice if you are going to view from a TV. There are two antenna ports, one for broadcast digital TV, and one for unencrypted cable programs using QAM. I don't have digital cable, so I can't comment on the digital cable compatibility.
I live in downtown San Francisco and have direct line of sight to the Sutro Tower TV tower about 3 miles away (use the excellent www.antennaweb.org site to find out about your location). I set up a small Terk TV5 amplified antenna on my windowsill, started up the EyeTV software, and started an autotune. It promptly caught 14 digital TV stations, about 1/3 of them HDTV. I wasn't expecting it to be this easy, the signal strength is around 80% and quality 100%.
The clarity of 720p or 1080i broadcasts on a 23 inch Apple Cinema HD has to be seen to be believed. Just to be clear, the card will catch all ATSC digital TV broadcasts, not just HDTV. HDTV streams are around 15Mbps, which shouldn't stress your machine, but full-screen playback eats up about 65% of both CPUs on my dual 2GHz PowerMac G5. If you try to play a recorded program in one window while live TV is playing in another, the video starts getting jerky. I hooked up my Mac to a 32" Sharp LCD TV via DVI, and the quality is also excellent there. You can set EyeTV to stream the sound directly to optical digital audio outputs independently from the system sound settings, and 5.1 Dolby Digital works fine.
The variety of programs available on digital TV does not match cable yet (no SciFi channel or Comedy Central...), so I am not intending to use it as a full-fledged replacement for my TiVo clone, but I will definitely start recording some shows like Fox's 24 in HD. The EyeTV software is very easy to use, and you can use the website www.titantv.com for program guides. TitanTV can be set up so a single click will add a program to the recording list, thus giving a system that is even easier to use than TiVo. For some reason, the integration between EyeTV and TitanTV does not work when you are trying to access TitanTV from EyeTV, perhaps because it tries partners.titantv.com instead of www.titantv.com, or because my default browser is Camino, not Safari. Accessing www.titantv.com directly from Camino fixed this problem. It's an excellent program guide: you can filter out channels you are not interested in, or filter programs to only see HD broadcasts or only movies.
In my previous test of EyeTV, the program was not able to wake up the Mac for a scheduled recording. This isn't strictly Elgato's fault, as Apple removed in OS X the OS 9 power manager APIs that make this easy to do, but since the box is Elgato's own design, they could have designed it to send a wakeup event over the Firewire bus using a clock embedded in the box. My Ovolab Phlink telephony adapter is capable of waking up the Mac when it receives a phone call. If you have another machine on the LAN that is always on, as I do, you can sort of work around this issue by making it issue a Wake-on-LAN packet to wake the Mac from sleep.
I have not yet attempted to edit the HD video captured using iMovie HD, but QuickTime does not seem to understand the recorded files, so there must be some missing codec.
I have no such reservations about the EyeTV 500, which is an excellent product. All HDTV gear will soon be required to implement the so-called broadcast flag, which allows content providers to block you from making recordings for your own use (see the EFF web site www.eff.org for more information), and I wanted to have a unit without this restriction, before the deadline. There are HDTV tuner cards for Linux, but my primary machine is a Mac, and the only really viable solution is the EyeTV 500.
The physical unit itself is a light gray plastic box the size of a paperback book. It connects to your Mac using Firewire 400. A nice touch, it is bus-powered, to reduce cable clutter. It does not have the heat build-up problems of the EyeTV 200. A remote control is supplied, which is quite nice if you are going to view from a TV. There are two antenna ports, one for broadcast digital TV, and one for unencrypted cable programs using QAM. I don't have digital cable, so I can't comment on the digital cable compatibility.
I live in downtown San Francisco and have direct line of sight to the Sutro Tower TV tower about 3 miles away (use the excellent www.antennaweb.org site to find out about your location). I set up a small Terk TV5 amplified antenna on my windowsill, started up the EyeTV software, and started an autotune. It promptly caught 14 digital TV stations, about 1/3 of them HDTV. I wasn't expecting it to be this easy, the signal strength is around 80% and quality 100%.
The clarity of 720p or 1080i broadcasts on a 23 inch Apple Cinema HD has to be seen to be believed. Just to be clear, the card will catch all ATSC digital TV broadcasts, not just HDTV. HDTV streams are around 15Mbps, which shouldn't stress your machine, but full-screen playback eats up about 65% of both CPUs on my dual 2GHz PowerMac G5. If you try to play a recorded program in one window while live TV is playing in another, the video starts getting jerky. I hooked up my Mac to a 32" Sharp LCD TV via DVI, and the quality is also excellent there. You can set EyeTV to stream the sound directly to optical digital audio outputs independently from the system sound settings, and 5.1 Dolby Digital works fine.
The variety of programs available on digital TV does not match cable yet (no SciFi channel or Comedy Central...), so I am not intending to use it as a full-fledged replacement for my TiVo clone, but I will definitely start recording some shows like Fox's 24 in HD. The EyeTV software is very easy to use, and you can use the website www.titantv.com for program guides. TitanTV can be set up so a single click will add a program to the recording list, thus giving a system that is even easier to use than TiVo. For some reason, the integration between EyeTV and TitanTV does not work when you are trying to access TitanTV from EyeTV, perhaps because it tries partners.titantv.com instead of www.titantv.com, or because my default browser is Camino, not Safari. Accessing www.titantv.com directly from Camino fixed this problem. It's an excellent program guide: you can filter out channels you are not interested in, or filter programs to only see HD broadcasts or only movies.
In my previous test of EyeTV, the program was not able to wake up the Mac for a scheduled recording. This isn't strictly Elgato's fault, as Apple removed in OS X the OS 9 power manager APIs that make this easy to do, but since the box is Elgato's own design, they could have designed it to send a wakeup event over the Firewire bus using a clock embedded in the box. My Ovolab Phlink telephony adapter is capable of waking up the Mac when it receives a phone call. If you have another machine on the LAN that is always on, as I do, you can sort of work around this issue by making it issue a Wake-on-LAN packet to wake the Mac from sleep.
I have not yet attempted to edit the HD video captured using iMovie HD, but QuickTime does not seem to understand the recorded files, so there must be some missing codec.
