TVMicro sized right for occasional TV/Mac usage
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jun 12, 2006 at 11:28pm
If tiny is in, Miglia Technology’s US$99 TVMicro is bound to be a hit. Though the “cool white” device is barely the size of an iPod shuffle, you can use it to watch and record analog TV on your Mac. Heck, it can record TV straight to your hard drive with a single mouse click.
It offers USB 2.0 connectivity, the marvelous EyeTV 2.0 (see our April 7 review) software and a remote control that’s 2-3 times bigger than the TVMicro itself. With the Miglia hardware/EyeTV 2.0 software combo, you can watch TV in a window or in full screen.
Files are recorded in VCD (MPEG-1), S-VCD (MPEG-2) or DVD (MPEG-2) quality. Unlike its big (and more expensive) brothers EvolutionTV or the excellent TVMini, TVMicro relies on your Mac to transform the TV signal into a digital file.
TVMicro isn’t as full featured as Miglia and Elgato’s other Personal Video Recorder (PVR) products, but it’s well suited for users on the go, folks wanting a fast and easy solution for watching TV on a Mac or (especially) those who just watch the ‘tube occasionally on their Mac. If you are really into watching TV on your computer, lay out the extra moolah for either the TVMini or the EyeTV 200. After all, when you throw in the remote and antenna or cable connections, the small size of the TVMicro loses some of its appeal. TVMicro requires a PowerPC (G4 or G5) or Intel based Mac with USB 2.0 connectivity and Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. You’ll need a dual G4, dual G5 or Intel Dual Core processor to record in full DVD quality.
Macsimum rating: 6.5 out of 10
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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.
