[Update, January 2005: Thanks to a firmware and software upgrade, the EyeTV 500 can now tune HDTV signals from both over-the-air and unencrypted digital cable (QAM) sources. Assuming you have digital cable, and your cable provider is not encrypting the "basic tier" channels, the EyeTV 500 should now work with the cable right from your wall.]
The conventional wisdom holds that Mac products are better than their Windows equivalents, but cost more. Well, at least where over-the-air digital television (DTV) tuner cards are concerned, the Elgato EyeTV 500 certainly confirms that wisdom.
Macintosh owners, you've got a clear category-leading product to buy right now, if you're looking for a DTV solution that is not burdened by the FCC's broadcast flag restrictions. When it comes to the features that matter—the ability to easily and reliably receive, record, and play back DTV programs in the same open format in which they are broadcast (mpeg2 transport streams)—the EyeTV is truly the best-of-breed product currently available (as of November 2004) on any platform that we've encountered.
For Mac owners eager to beat the broadcast flag mandate and able to afford the EyeTV's $350 price tag, your search is over. This is the product to buy.
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy to set up and use. | Expensive ($350). |
| Reliable tuner and recorder. | No antenna included. |
| Works on older Macs for recording. | PowerMac Dual G5 needed for smooth playback. |
| Records in mpeg transport stream, for maximum post-capture flexibility. | Exporting to DVD has bugs. |
What You Get
So what do you get for your $350? In the box is the EyeTV 500, a CD-ROM that includes Elgato's EyeTV software, and a remote control. No antenna is included, although you can pick up a small indoor antenna for under $30.
The hardware piece of the EyeTV 500 is essentially a DTV tuner card housed in a silver plastic case. It communicates with your Mac, and receives its power, over a Firewire cable (connecting directly to any Firewire-equipped Mac should work fine, but if you intend to use a Firewire hub, make sure it can provide the necessary amount of power).
In addition to the Firewire connector, the rear panel sports an antenna input for your DTV antenna. We used a small indoor antenna, which worked very well even from inside our brick and steel framed office in San Francisco (your ability to receive DTV signals over-the-air will depend on your location and other variables). There is a second antenna input, currently capped off with a plastic cover, that Elgato hopes to enable in a future firmware update to receive unencrypted digital cable signals (digital cable uses QAM, as distinguished from over-the-air DTV, which uses ATSC). Finally, there is an AC plug, which can be used to provide power from an external "wallwart" power adapter (not included). The device has no power switch—it stays on as long as it is connected to a powered Firewire cable.
The EyeTV Digital Video Recorder is the software that runs the EyeTV 500 tuner (and apparently
all of the other EyeTV products—you select which product you have when you first launch the software). Since the latest version of the software is always available without restriction from the Elgato website, the wise thing to do is to ignore the included CD-ROM and simply download the current version. The software is a snap to install, using the usual no-installer, "drag and drop" approach of modern OS X apps. The software takes care of scheduling recordings, keeping your recordings organized, as well as playing both live TV and your stored programs. On first run, the software creates an "EyeTV Archive" folder where it stores all of your recordings, channel setting, recording schedule, and other application-related data.
The remote only controls the EyeTV 500 and the EyeTV PVR software, so it can be used to change channels and alter the volume, but not to control other aspects of your Mac. If you want more complete remote control for a Mac you intend to use in your living room, you'll need to look for third-party products.
System Requirements
So how much Mac do you need to use the EyeTV 500? That turns out to be a complicated question.
If you intend to have your Mac handle all of your DTV duties—watching live TV, recording, and playing back recorded shows—you'll probably want a dual-G5 PowerMac. We tried the EyeTV software on a variety of machines, including a 1.6GHZ single-processor G5 PowerMac, a 1.8GHZ single-processor G5 iMac, and a 1ghz G4 12" Powerbook. The experience made it clear that playing back high-def DTV (not all DTV is high-def, but one of the chief reasons to get DTV is for the high-def content) is extremely processor intensive. On both G5 machines, for example, the EyeTV software routinely accounted for between 70-80% of the processor capacity while playing high-def programs.
The EyeTV software relies on no hardware acceleration for mpeg playback, which explains the processor load. The entire burden of decoding and displaying the high-def mpeg2 file falls on the CPU. When I asked EyeTV why it did not take advantage of the hardware acceleration included in the graphics cards installed in modern Macs, they explained that Apple has not made those interfaces easily accessible to third party developers. Enabling hardware acceleration is thus not likely to be in the cards for EyeTV's software in the near future.
On the single-processor G5 machines, DTV playback was quite good, but not perfect. In scenes that involved slow pans, for example, the pans were not reproduced with perfect smoothness. The results, however, were very watchable, despite the minor glitches. But for optimal playback, a dual-G5 system would be better.
So the short answer is: you need a G5 Mac, and preferably a dual-processor PowerMac.
But there's a bit more to the story. For those who don't have a G5 Mac, the EyeTV 500 can still be very useful as a "back-end" solution. In other words, you can hook the EyeTV 500 up an older Mac (even a G3 machine) for recording duties. Recording DTV, as distinguished from playing DTV, is not processor intensive—all the Mac has to do is direct the mpeg2 transport stream from the Firewire jack to the hard drive. For example, a G3/500 iMac in our office (current eBay price, <$400) had no trouble recording the high-def broadcast of "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day. (Those who want to use a G3 Mac will have to use the older v.1.5 of the EyeTV software, which is available on the website; the current versions of the software only run on G4 and G5 Macs.)
Of course, you will need some other device for playback. But the good news is that there are cheaper ways to achieve high-def mpeg2 playback. For example, diskless "networked media players" are beginning to appear on the market for <$300 that are capable of playing mpeg2 files stored elsewhere on your home network. Or you might use a cheaper PC running Windows or Linux as your "front-end" for playback.
In any event, the price for mpeg playback will continue to fall in the months ahead. But your ability to buy a DRM-free DTV tuner like the EyeTV 500 will be cut off in July 2005 by the FCC's broadcast flag regulations. So you might want to buy now, even if you don't have a perfect playback solution yet.
And no matter what Mac you choose, you will need lots and lots of hard drive space. High-def DTV programs fill more than 7GB per hour. "Saving Private Ryan," for example, filled 19.8GB. Because it appears that the EyeTV software prefers to record all programs to a single "EyeTV Archive" folder, it was not obvious to me how you could easily spread your recorded programs over more than one volume. So you'll want to buy a single large hard drive and dedicate it to EyeTV's use. In our tests, EyeTV had no trouble recording to external Firewire drives.
Using EyeTV
The EyeTV 500 was a snap to install, configure, and use. The software launches automatically when the EyeTV 500 is connected via Firewire. On first launch, you are asked to identify which Elgato product you are using, enter your TitanTV user information, and wait for the tuner to find all channels that are available. And that's about it—I was watching DTV 10 minutes after connecting the antenna.
The EyeTV software relies on the TitanTV website for channel guide information. After registering with TitanTV, I had to configure my account to add a "record" function to the contextual menu in Safari. Once this was done, I was able to use Safari to look for upcoming programs on the TitanTV website, then add them to the EyeTV record queue with a simple cntl-click. The EyeTV software automatically imports all the relevant metadata—time, channel, program description—from the TitanTV site. The EyeTV software also allows you to program recordings manually, if TitanTV happens to omit a listing (which it occasionally does).
Because EyeTV relies on the TitanTV website for its channel guide, it is not able to provide all the functionality that TiVo owners enjoy—you can't create a "wishlist" that records all programs featuring Cary Grant, for example. But it certainly works well enough for most everyday recording needs.
EyeTV's software also offers a variety of relatively intelligent "skip" and "fast forward" features that make skipping commercials (or anything else) easy. The fast forward feature includes the same "automatic backup" feature made popular by TiVo—when you come out of fast forward, the software tries to back up a bit so that you don't miss any of your program. The combination of 30-second skip and "automatic backup" make it very easy to skip commercials.
What's On?
It turns out there is quite a bit of DTV content being broadcast over-the-air today. Check out TitanTV's listings for a full list. We were able to record high-def broadcasts of CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, Star Trek Enterprise, Everwood, Soundstage, Austin City Limits, and Desperate Housewives. We also recorded the high-def broadcasts of Monday Night Football, the World Series, Saving Private Ryan, and Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring.
In addition to these high-def broadcasts, there was an even wider array of standard-def programming available, as well. While these programs were not high-def, it is important to note that recording a standard-def program from a digital broadcast results in a much higher quality recording than TiVo can accomplish from its analog inputs, even at its "Best" setting.
Features: Auto-Aspect Ratio Detection
EyeTV's software also offers a few features beyond simple recording and playback that deserve special mention. One is automatic aspect ratio detection.
Unfortunately, DTV broadcasters today mix a variety of different aspect ratios in their broadcast programming. Movies and high-def shows, for example, are usually broadcast in the 16:9 aspect ratio. The commercials shown during those shows, however, are often in the old 4:3 aspect ratio. Many standard-def programs are also in the older 4:3 aspect ratio.
This mess of different aspect ratios can play havoc with a computer trying to display DTV content, resulting in inconsistent letter-boxing, stretching and squeezing of the picture. I'm a bit more sensitive about this than most, but I can't bear to watch a program when it feels as though the picture is being squeezed or stretched.
EyeTV's software has some very clever logic built into it that automatically detects the proper aspect ratio and resizes the screen on the fly. This feature works remarkably well, and (as far as we have been able to discover) appears to be unique to EyeTV among DTV PVR software.
Features: Editing
The EyeTV software also offers you a simple editing capability. This turns out to be incredibly useful for conserving hard disk space, as you can edit out commercials or other unwanted portions of a program. The EyeTV software then rebuilds the mpeg transport stream, discarding the deleted material.
The editor is simple to use, requiring no special video editing expertise, and works reliably. It does, however, make a temporary buffer copy of the entire recording being edited, so you need at least enough free disk space to accommodate the temp copy. I discovered this limitation after I managed to repeatedly crash the EyeTV software because I had run short of space. To its credit, the EyeTV application did not corrupt the original recording, despite my repeated crashes. That's a nice touch, suggesting some careful, fault-tolerant programming.
The editor will not give you the kind of sophisticated, frame-by-frame capabilities that a more full-featured digital video editor will afford, but that's fine. Since the EyeTV saves programs as mpeg2 transport streams, you can use whatever software you like on the recordings.
Features: Exporting Programs
If there is one place where the EyeTV currently falls short, it is in its ability to export recorded programs to other formats, including DVD or VCD. Given the enormous size of recorded DTV programs (especially high-def programs), it stands to reason that users will want to offload some of their recordings to DVD, VCD, or other compressed formats. All of these formats are lower in resolution, and thus require transcoding from high-definition mpeg2 transport streams to some other format. EyeTV offers a wide variety of transcoding options, including options intended to make it easy to burn recorded programs to DVD.
I had high hopes for these transcoding and burning options, especially since Elgato is the same company behind the leading Macintosh burning software, Roxio's Toast. But my experience with these features was hit or miss, with the transcoding being very slow (over 3 hours to transcode a 1 hour program) and the resulting DVDs often being unusable (audio and video failing to sync). I had difficulties whether I used Apple's own iDVD or Roxio's Toast 6.0 Titanium DVD burning software.
The good news here is that, because the EyeTV 500 stores its recordings as unencrypted mpeg2 transport streams, you don't need to rely solely on Elgato for your transcoding and burning needs. I assume that Elgato will be improving this aspect of their software in future releases. But even if they don't, there are plenty of other applications that can and will allow you to manipulate the mpeg transport streams created by EyeTV.
Conclusions
Windows tuner cards are available for as little as $150. Linux alternatives start at under $200. That makes the EyeTV 500 spendy at $350. But based on our research so far, however, it appears that no other option is as easy to set up and use as the EyeTV 500. And for Mac owners, it's the only game in town.
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