The EyeTV 250 Plus is an external USB based tuner that supports NTSC (Analog Cable and Satellite), ATSC (Digital Satellite) and QAM (Digital Cable). (Not all the models available for sale on Amazon are the newer one that added QAM support, so be careful This one definitely has the QAM support). It also has an adapter that can accept Composite and S-Video inputs along with analog stereo audio. For my purposes I was most interested in the QAM capability since I am a cable subscriber. The biggest difference between the cheaper EyeTV Hybrid and the EyeTV 250 Plus is that the 250 has an external MPEG-2 (Video)/MPEG-1 (Audio) encoder (The Hybrid model relies on your CPU to convert the signal into digital format). The advantage here is that when you're recording or viewing something off of either analog TV or the analog inputs all the encoding happens outside of your computer, so all the computer has to do is decode and display the video. This takes a lot of load off your CPU so it becomes much easier to multi-task.The tuner itself is great. The biggest plus (in my case) is the ability to pick up Clear QAM digital HD channels. This confines you to only the broadcast channels (ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, and PBS in my case). It does take quite a bit of CPU power to handle HD broadcasts however.
More important than the tuner is the included EyeTV 3 Software, which controls the tuner. EyeTV 3 is pretty slick. It includes a TitanTV subscription so you can access TV listings and even remotely schedule a recording to your Mac. The program also allows you set up favorite channels. It also keeps the list of all the channels you have access to, which is my case is 461. Keep in mind that's an analog and digital version of every basic channel, plus the five HD channels I can see plus all the other HD channels that I can detect but can't watch (it just says encrypted). The only other channels that show up are any non-encrypted digital channels such as the local school districts TV stations and On-demand channels.
What I like best about EyeTV 3 (and I'm using 3.0.2) is that it offers a plethora of deinterlacing options. My number one annoyance is interlaced content. The beauty of EyeTV is that it does a great job deinterlacing content, which makes SD material look a whole lot better and removes some of the annoying jaggies in HD material. While it has the standard motion-adaptive and always settings for deinterlacing, it also offers a progressive scan setting which doubles the frame rate from 30 frames per second to 60 frames per second. The results is especially noticeable when watching SD material. I have to watch Versus via the s-video inputs on the EyeTV and I can hardly believe the huge difference that the progressive scan setting makes for watching hockey. It doesn't make it look anywhere close to HD but it makes it look a whole lot better. It's a bigger strain to use the progressive scan setting on HD content and it makes even more Core 2 Duo powered mini sweat (although I think this may have more to do with the poor on-board graphics) but with HD I don't find progressive scan to be as big of a plus.
The other great thing about EyeTV is that it functions as a super-DVR. You can set up series recordings just like you can with a normal DVR and EyeTV records the program and saves it to your hard drive. You can then use the built-in editor to remove commercials, etc. While the editor isn't iMovie, it's pretty good and the preview panes down on the bottom can help you find the commercials quickly. What makes EyeTV superior to a regular DVR is that you can keep your recordings around as long as you have disk space and you can edit them. You can automatically have recordings exported to other formats even directly for your iPod or Apple TV. Many people have asked about a recording feature for the Apple TV, and the EyeTV is the closest thing to it. You can set up a recording, and then tell it to export to Apple TV and add to iTunes. Once the show is finished it'll do the exporting and it'll be available on the Apple TV.
So what isn't it good at? Well, I find the exporting feature the most frustrating. It captures everything in MPEG-2 video and either AC3 Audio or MPEG-1 Audio. My frustration is that the exporting feature is extremely slow. When I do a recording sometimes I'll get about 3 seconds of data on the beginning of the recording that I don't want there. Editing it out is easy enough, but then EyeTV insists on compacting the whole recording again. Also, even though EyeTV can capture and play AC3 (Dolby Digital) tracks, it can't output them to QuickTime files. It's AppleTV setting also lacks support for 24 frames per second so everything (even if its HD) is dropped to 960*540 if it has a frame rate of 30 fps. (The good news is that the solution to this program is free! HandBrake) I also find the lack of dual tuners annoying. Although EyeTV 3 has a Picture-In-Picture function it can't be used unless you have two devices because the EyeTV 250 Plus is a single tuner only. This also means that if you're recording a program you also have to watch whatever you're recording. So if there are two programs on at the same time that you want to record you're out of luck. My final complaint is a pipe dream, but it would be really nice if the EyeTV 250 could accept component and digital inputs for the recording of HD material with digital audio.
All in all I am extremely satisfied with the EyeTV 250 Plus, despite the few shortcomings. It provides a great TV-on-you-Mac solution at a relatively low cost.
The options for quality and recording length are limitless. There are four quality setups and then a custom one which you can tweak every setting. I believe recording length is limited to 12 hours per recording which is no problem for me. Seamless integration with Toast (which also came with it) and a plethora of export options to keep anyone happy. The quality is crisp. People that complain of VHS conversion quality encoding have one of two problems 1) They don't remember how crappy VHS looks compared to digital 2) Their VCR is a piece of garbage. I'm using an $1800 professional Sony editing VCR as the playback device it cleans up the quality and makes the tapes look as good as possible. Remember The better the source, the better the quality. Don't expect this device to make your tapes look better, just the same. However, I was able to tweak some tapes that had poor color and sharpness from a crappy camcorder. It has those settings, too.
It's mac quality at its finest I have transferred over 60 hours of video in my first week with it without ONE problem. No errors, glitches, encoding errors, anything IT JUST WORKS.
There is a PC version made by Terratec, but it's kind of hard to find I've read that it is almost as good as this for the PC.
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It was a breeze to hook up and get running on my Mac: plug in the device, let the setup run to scan for channels, define the recording directory, etc. The software is mostly trouble-free, but has a few minor glitches that I've gotten used to.One is a one-time annoyance: linking the channels to the TitanTV program guide. It's a little more tedious than it needs to be. The second problem is an ongoing thing: occasionally, when it wakes up to record a program it doesn't seem to "see" the signal from the antenna and i get a blank recording instead of a show. If you're "catch-up" watching (watching a show while you're recording it) it will yank you out of your show and into live tv when the recording finishes, and you have to go back and find your place to continue watching the recording. Finally, it seems to eat up more CPU time than it should, even while it's not (apparently) doing anything. However, El Gato seems to be very committed to software maintenance and enhancement, and the EyeTV software has improved even in the short time i've owned it!
All in all, though, it's easy to use, convenient and a great alternative to those all-in-one DVR boxes, since you have so much control over scheduling, editing and exporting for later iPod viewing.If you have cable and an iMac, and simply want to watch TV on your Mac then this is a great choice.
If you want to put HDTV in a sitting room or lounge, and want DVR capability, then you can't do much better than a 27" iMac and the EyeTV 250 Plus. I recommend an external 1TB (or bigger) FW800 drive, but it's not essential.
If you are looking for a high performance AV setup for your cutting-edge home theater, then you can do better, but the EyeTV 250 Plus and a Mac Mini is still an excellent cost-effective option for a DVR, especially if you want to avoid DRM plagued AppleTV and cable/satellite boxes and want the convenience of a turnkey system.
I recently upgraded from a four year old third party demodulator/encoder box to the EyeTV 250 Plus. This also allowed me to upgrade from EyeTV (software) version 2.4 to version 3.3.1. I'm pleased with both, but very happy with the hardware. The whole setup runs on a 20" iMac (mid-2007 2.0GHz Core2Duo, 128MB Radeon HD 2400 graphics with 1680x1050 resolution), also upgraded with an external 4TB RAID array.
My house receives "antenna service" on cable an unfiltered clear QAM signal from my cable provider. This signal includes analog broadcast channels, most basic cable channels and many digital HDTV channels, both broadcast and cable. It appears to be the intended service for this device.
The EyeTV 250 Plus hardware does a very good job encoding all of these cable signals into streaming digital video. (The default settings for analog SD encoding are a little dark, but the software gives you control over this.) All encoding is done in hardware and provided to the computer's USB input. Analog SD signals are very clean, and -unlike my previous devicethe Elgato output is free of glitches caused by flashes and jump cuts. HDTV signals broadcast at 720p and 1080i come thru sharp and crisp and very well balanced. A range of deinterlacing options are provided, and the adaptive option works well.
The encoding module is small and unobtrusive, and the power module fits on a power strip without interfering with adjacent plugs. I really can't find much to criticize with the hardware it could offer more encoding/compression options, but the options provided are adequate. The connectors are all very close together, making threading on the cable connector sometimes difficult, but that seems to be a universal problem with appliances using the cable TV 'F' connector. The remote control operation is a little obtuse some of the buttons are unlabled, and even when you press them it's not clear what they do. Behavior seems to depend on whether you're watching live TV or a recording. I'm sure there's a manual page somewhere buried on the CD-ROM, but Elgato should have provided a quick reference card with this remote.
The EyeTV 3 software provides several functions: 1) buffering and watching live TV, 2) recording programs and playing them back, 3) managing your library of recorded programming, 4) editing and exporting recorded programming, and 5) the channel lineup and programming guide.
For EyeTV software, functions 1) and 2) are essentially the same operation. Live TV is recorded to a buffer of configurable size, and played back from that file for display. Version 3 of this software allows the user to save this buffer into a video file or begin a new recording. Only one Live TV stream is available per encoding device, but the number of playback files isn't limited unless you choose the preferences option to use only a single playback window.
Playback is responsive and robust as long as the hard drive can keep up. This is usually not an issue, but I encountered it using an exceptionally slow external drive (now replaced). If the file storage device is slow or busy, playback exhibits hesitation and skipping; there is room for improvement here by adding an adaptive playback buffer on a local drive to accommodate slow storage media. This will be a more common problem as people adopt NAS devices, or share libraries between EyeTV installations.
The other way to record a program is to schedule a recording. The schedule features in EyeTV 3 are much improved, with the basic scheduling more than adequate to timeshift a nightly or weekly program. For collecting entire seasons of series, the Smart Season Guide feature will help you find new episodes and avoid recording repeats.
The software includes a basic editor, suitable for trimming the ends and commercialectomies, and exports programs to iPod, iPhones, Toast (a basic version is bundled with EyeTV) and other libraries/devices.
The final feature is the programming guide. This is the one area where I am dissatisfied with EyeTV and Elgato. Certainly, the quality of this feature depends a lot on the content provider (in this case, TV Guide and formerly Titan TV) and Elgato claims to be trying to keep the cost of subscription down. But the EyeTV program guide and its interface to TVGuide's servers are not robust, and failure mode reporting is obtuse and uninformative. In general the approach is inelegant and frustrating to use. Associating user-configured channels with any program guide source is next to impossible. I find the web-based TitanTV service easier to use, and to Elgato's credit, the interface between the TitanTV browser window and EyeTV is nearly seamless.
Elgato provides reasonably good customer service on its website for its hardware and software. I have had good and bad experiences with its ticket submission system. Their response time is usually one or two days. Their knowledgebase is less satisfactory, and often contains out of date information. Your first and best resource for support should be the EyeTV Lounge discussion forum. Several Elgato technical support representatives are active on this forum and will either answer your questions or refer you to their support ticket system.
All in all, the EyeTV hardware and software are the best, most integrated solution to connect the coax coming out of your wall to a Macintosh, and competes very strongly with some of the best Windows and Unix based solutions. It doesn't replace a cable box, and certainly won't decrypt scrambled Pay TV channels. It's meant for a clear QAM cable signal, and does the basics very, very well.
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This thing does what it is designed to do: however, some Internet descriptions of it are vague (and the manufacturer's own site could be clearer) so please be sure that it is designed to do what you WANT it to do. Also, while it has a lot of DVR features (including some that some of the reviewers obviously couldn't figure out and claimed it doesn't have) it is NOT a Tivo or a single-function DVR and it is NOT as easy to use or as gee-whizzy as such stand-alone devices usually are.While it does have its own signal processor (which is why I picked it over the EyeTV Hybrid) your computer does still have some work to do. I don't care what it says on the box, if you don't have a Core Duo or preferably a Core Duo 2 based machine, don't bother unless you are willing to put up with slower performance and possible performance issues. That, as they say, is life. Also, make sure your OS is up to date, you have plenty of RAM, and you don't have fifty zillion little doohickies running in the background all the time. I am using a 1.8GHz Core Duo 2 Mac Mini with OSX 10.3 and 2GB of RAM, recording to an external USB2 HD, and it is smooth as can be.
I am using it solely to digitize VHS videotapes. To answer a question it took me FOREVER to research on the Web, it DOES allow you to digitize commercial VHS tapes with Macrovision. (However, I am digitizing tapes I own for archival/backup purposes, which is clearly allowed under US Copyright Law no matter what the content providers claim. You should not use it to digitize tapes or other media you don't own, because that's stealing. Also, once you digitize them, you can destroy them, but you can't give them away or sell them, because that's also stealing.) The quality is acceptable especially when you consider, as another poster pointed out, that VHS video quality sucks compared to modern digital cable, HDTV, or DVD media.
While you can adjust the recording quality, please be advised that digitized video at watchable quality takes up lots of space. I'm averaging about a gig and a half an hour of VHS video. If you want to watch it on a big screen and enjoy the experience, you can't compare it to how small the little videos people email you are or YouTube videos. If you aren't willing to buy some HD space, then either digitize at low quality and don't complain, or don't buy this thing for digitizing video.
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