TVMini HD: tune in, turn on
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Apr 5, 2006 at 11:19pm
I didn’t think I’d find a TV tuner for my Mac that matched my all-time favorite: the EyeTV 200 (see my Sept. 15 review), but, darn, Miglia Technology has done it with the US$249.95 TVMini HD, which allows you to watch, pause record and rewind free-to-air Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) on your Mac.
The TVMini HD is a USB 2.0 device (though, admittedly, I’d prefer FireWire) and requires a to 500MHz G4 or greater to handle the bandwidth. The system requirements are more than reasonable considering what you get. Set-up is a breeze, and the TVMini HD comes with the near-perfect EyeTV 200 software (which we’ll review tomorrow since it’s available as a separate product). It also has USB and antenna jacks.
The USB plugs into your Mac, and the antenna plugs into whatever type of antenna you’re using. The ATSC tuner built into the device decodes Over The Air (OTA) HDTV and SDTV signals and plays them live on your Mac’s screen. By the way the TVMini HD comes with an antenna. It’s far from top-of-the-line, but it’s better than many of the “rabbit ear” antennas I’ve used in the past. On the other hand, the device accepts a digital cable feed and that’s the way to go, if you have this option.
About the size of a deck of cards, the TVMini HD comes with a remote control. You can “shift time” by pausing live television, rewinding or fast forwarding. You can edit recorded television to remove unwanted content or save a favorite scene and archive programs to DVD, SVCD or VideoCD to play on most standard DVD players. The TVMini HD offers Closed Captioning and TeleText for International users. You can export to iMovie HD, iDVD, Final Cut Pro HD / Express HD or DVD. And you can play television in its own window, side-by-side with other applications, at full screen or even in the Dock.
As far as I can tell, this is the first device that can record unencrypted QAM HDTV broadcasts over digital cable.
DVB-T or Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) is known as Freeview in the UK and TNT in France. The TVMini HD supports DVB-T multilingual programs and Dolby Digital audio—if supported by your Mac. However, while the TVMini Hd will let you watch unencrypted digital TV content, it’s not compatible with paid digital cable or satellite services. Many cable TV providers broadcast free-to-air digital channels on their networks, but 1080i broadcasts require a dual PowerPC G5 processor.
You can get programs in Standard or High (1080i) Definition, and the quality—especially in the latter—is outstanding. But be warned: you need LOTS of storage space. A typical one-hour TV show will eat up between 5-8GB of storage. However, you can You can also rename and move your EyeTV recordings in the Finder. Export to iPod or burn DVDs with a click.
All in all, there’s very little to complain about with Miglia’s device. And with its silver/white design, it looks good with just about any Mac, pro or consumer model.
Macsimum requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher and USB connectivity (the EyeTV 2.0 software works with both PowerPC and Intel Macs).
Macsimum rating: 9 out of 10.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 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.
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