Overhauled EyeTV a must-have upgrade
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Apr 7, 2006 at 5:00am
EyeTV 2 is a total overhaul of Elgato’s Mac OS X software for recording and viewing TV. The software was good before; now it’s great. The revamp looks and feels more Mac-like than ever; in fact, if you were to simply glance at its interface, you might easily assume EyeTV 2 is an app that comes with Mac OS X.
EyeTV 2 comes with some personal/digital recording devices such as Miglia’ TVMini HD, which we reviewed on April 6. If you bought EyeTV hardware or software after Dec. 1, 2005, you’re entitled to a free upgrade. Otherwise—and this is a first for the EyeTV product—you’ll have to buy it for US$79.
But it’s worth it, almost for the interface alone. After installing EyeTV 2 and opening it up, you’ll notice that’s very similar to iTunes and iPhoto. For instance, you can drag and drop recordings into playlists any way you like, sort them by genre, series, season, etc. Click on icons in the left-hand pane and you can access those recordings, see a list of accessible channels and more. You can use drag and drop to manage EyeTV recordings, channels, and schedules, all in one window. And you can also rename and move your EyeTV recordings in the Finder. From the Finder, double-clicking on any EyeTV recording will open it up within the Elgate software.
You can send your music videos, TV shows, and movie recordings onto your iPod with a click. check the box called “iPod” beside the schedule, and as soon as the recording is complete, it will export automatically to your iPod. iTunes will then launch and sync with your connected iPod. And with EyeTV 2’s MPEG-4 format, you can hook your iPod up to a TV. You’re not going to get big-screen Lord of the Rings quality, but it’s pretty darn good. What’s more, you can burn DVDs with a click.
EyeTV 2 has two new buttons on the main interface. One is the export to iPod button. The other is a Toast button that will let you use Roxio’s CD/DVD burning software from within the Elgato product—assuming you have bought and installed Toast. If you haven’t, well, ignore that button.
Version 2 also has some cool new video editing tools. The Editor’s action menu now has an “Invert Markers” command so that you can mark your edits and then decide if you want to keep the footage between the markers, or dispense with that and keep the rest of the show instead. Plus, there are new “intelligent” export presets and file formats—though you can still choose you own export settings.
EyeTV 2 features an integrated TV guide (EPG) that displays broadcast schedules within the EyeTV main window and retrieves information from digital broadcasts and from online TV guide services (TitanTV for North America, tvtv for Europe.)
If you’re really into making your Mac the center of your digital life, EyeTV 2 and a compatible TV tuner/recorder are must-have items.
System requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later; a PowerPC G4 or Intel Core Duo Mac (500MHz or faster); 256MB of RAM (512MB is recommended).
Macsimum rating: 10 out of 10.
Tim Says:
Does it actually record MPEG-4 onto the hard drive as it records or is that an export? The difference is, of course, a ton of time lost in exporting. I’ve asked Elgato about this several times but never received a straight answer.
Personally, I find their charging of software to run their hardware (considering it’s limited functions, not like a whole computer) to be very greedy. Especially so, since their earlier versions were never written that well and often extremely buggy.
Posted on April 07, 2006
Martin Hill Says:
I paid up for version 2 of the EyeTV software with some trepidation but am very happy with the result. Much more Mac-like and very robust than the earlier versions. I do wish Elgato would charge less, but I can understand their perspective as they are now moving more and more into providing the software to be used with other companies TV tuner hardware (Miglia, ConvertX etc) and thus can’t necessarily rely on sales of their own hardware for income.
Tim said:
“Does it actually record MPEG-4 onto the hard drive as it records or is that an export? The difference is, of course, a ton of time lost in exporting.”
The answer is - it depends and who cares! :-)
You see, it depends on which model of EyeTV (or 3rd party) TV tuner hardware you get. If you get an analog TV receiver (eg. EyeTV EZ or EyeTV 200) you can choose which codec (eg. MPEG-4) to capture the analog signal to disk as. However, if you want the highest quality of TV broadcast, you’ll want one of the digital TV receivers like the EyeTV 310, DTT, 410, 500 or 610). Which of these depends on your digital TV source. Check out the product matrix page for more info: http://elgato.com/matrix/index.php
With digital reception, the receiver is actually really just downloading the MPEG-2 file being broadcast by the TV station without digitising anything. As a result you get easily DVD quality without all the snow and low res of an analog TV signal. The outcome of this is your TV programs are stored as large, but very high quality MPEG-2 files on your hard disk. This is not Elgato’s fault, but the nature of digital TV which still uses MPEG-2 rather than H.264 or similar for broadcast.
This is actually a good thing as it means you get the highest quality original without any of the generational losses you sustain digitising something. People like me can then re-compress multiple versions of shows and movies I record for burning to DVD, compressing for playback on my Video iPod, cutting out snippets of funny videos and compressing down for emailing to friends etc. Because EyeTV allows you to queue up compression jobs, I just queue up a whole lot of jobs and leave it churning overnight. I can handle a bit of delay converting the video into all these different formats if it means I get the broadcast in it’s highest possible quality to start with.
Once you start viewing digital TV, you will NOT want to go back to analog. It’s like the difference between a high quality DVD and a VHS tape. Trust me on this!
As far as the cable problems mentioned, I can’t really comment as here in Australia only a small proportion of the population has signed up for PayTV (cable or satellite) - we tend to think of it as 300 channels of junk - and I find I have more than enough content to choose to record on our various free-to-air Digital TV channels. I’ve now built up a library of over a 100 movies, and dozens of documentaries and kids shows (for the nieces and nephews!) saved in H.264 format 2 or 3 movies to a DVD-R and on the iPod of all the shows I didn’t have time or interest in watching when they were on, but which we can now call up whenever and wherever we want. And all of course sans Ads.
You actually find yourself watching less TV - no more vegging in front of the box, one show of garbage dragging on into the next. Instead, you watch what you want when you want without mindless ads. It is actually quite life-changing!
-Mart
Posted on April 09, 2006
Jason Says:
I am amazed how little time people spend to do basic things such as check their spelling and grammar when posting comments. Spell checking is even built-in. Even a fourth grader can capitalize the first letter in a sentence.
As far as e-mails from year(s) ago, send them again.
Posted on April 10, 2006
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
Timothy Smith Says:
how is this a must have upgrade
it cant record almost all digital cable channels due to incription but cable comanies, and hbo and other paid premuim channels cannot be recorded in you wildest dreams. I use tivo with a dvdrw so i cant put shows on my ipod. with tivo togo for mac coming out this summer it is much better than this. mac as entertainment hub is nothing more than a geek dream. I aksed elgato to included IR channel changers so it can control a cable box or a cablecard slot. they said they are plaing this. email was sent over a year ago:-(
Posted on April 07, 2006