Review: Eye TV 250 Plus a fine, flexible TV tuner (and more)

Posted by Dennis Sellers Jun 12, 2008 at 10:34pm

I’ve reviewed several TV tuner products for the Mac, but I’ve never reviewed the Eye TV 250 Plus—until now. Which is too bad, as it’s one of the best of its kind, thanks to its flexibility beyond letting you watch and record TV. Basically, it’s a hybrid TV tuner for the Mac with a hardware encoder.

Extremely easy to set up, it receives both digital TV as well as analog TV. Analog TV shows look good, but your reception for either will depend on your location (which is, of course, not Elgato’s fault)—and you’ll have to provide your own antenna. In areas where HDTV is broadcast, you can watch 720p or 1080i HDTV (MPEG-2) in addition to the other digital television standards. (The Elgato device supports “over-the-air” HD programming, but not the digital cable variety.) The Eye TV Plus 250 also supports Dolby Digital sound.

Unfortunately—and this is true of every TV tuner I’ve test driven—the watching cable on your Mac is not nearly as crisp and sharp as watching it on a decent TV. The video is clearer when you keep the viewing window small. If you make it full size or full screen, you’ll want to sit a ways back from your Mac’s display so you don’t see the compression artifacts. This is one of the reasons, my Mac doesn’t double as a TV that often.

Still, the EyeTV 250 Plus records digital television in the lossless quality setting. It records high quality video from analog sources, compressing audio and video signals to small size MPEG-2 files and frees up your processor for other activities. There’s a bit of latency, but it’s not bad. (Note: the 250 Plus’s built-in MPEG-2 encoder is used to encode the video from analog sources. This is completely separate from the function of Elgato’s Turbo.264, which accelerates the conversion of existing recordings to H.264 format.)

The Eye TV 250 Plus also offers an easy-to-use solution for converting videos from VHS tape to DVD-Video. It includes ports for coaxial, S-Video, and composite video inputs, along with RCA audio plugs, which work great—along with the VHS Assistant, software that guides you step-by-step through the conversion process—for digitizing video footage from a camcorder. The ports also allow you to connect a set-top box directly to your Mac.

The TV tuner comes with an intuitive iPod Assistant to help you convert analog video to iPod/iPhone/Apple TV formats. Other bundled software includes Toast 8 Basic (Toast itself is up to version 9 in the retail version), which lets you burn your recordings to DVD .

Another nice touch: the Eye TV 250 Plus now comes with a Xceive 5000 silicon tuner and 6th generation demodulator technology for improved reception (both analog and digital) and unencrypted digital cable (Clear QAM) support. It also comes with EyeTV 3 software, one of my favorite Mac products. I won’t rehash what I love about it here. You can read my Feb. 28 review.

The Eye TV 205 Plus requires: a Mac with a PowerPC G4,G5 or Intel Core processor; 512MB of RAM; a built-in USB 2.0 port; and Mac OS X v10.4 or later. An Internet connection required to download Program Guide data. Also note that 720p or 1080i HD features require a Dual PowerPC G5 or an Intel Core Duo processor.

Macsimum rating: 8 out of 10

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