Elgato EyeTV

Last year we switched to the Mac. After enjoying the benefits of Beyond TV on our PC, we still wanted to be able to have the same capabilities on our Mac. After some searching discussion boards and reviews, I settled on EyeTV by Elgato. It seemed to offer a similar feature range as Beyond TV and had decent reviews.

I ordered the Eyetv 250 Plus, which comes with the EyeTV software and supports for composite & S-Video as well as analog NTSC and over-the-air HDTV.

The EyeTV software runs in the Mac GUI. By contrast, BeyondTV had a non-Windows interface designed for TV viewing. This worked great when using their Beyond TV Link client program to view another PC's recorded shows running the main BeyondTV software. We'd hook a notebook up to the TV and start browsing. But on the main PC, the interface felt too clunky.

The first version of EyeTV that came in the box recorded only at scheduled times. A nice feature of BeyondTV was you could select a show and it would figure out the times for you and only record new episodes. The latest version of EyeTV now has a similar feature called Smart Schedules. The only problem I've had with this is that not all shows use the "new" (aka not a rerun) flag properly so either all shows come up as new or none at all. Smart Schedules let you also specify channel, show title, and other parameters, which gives more precise control than BeyondTV. For instance, Family Guy appears on several networks but new episodes are on Fox. You can tell it to only record from Fox (whatever channel that is in your area).

Like BeyondTV, it can export to iPod/AppleTV via iTunes. We just got an AppleTV, which took the place of the laptop running BeyondTV Link.

EyeTV has a unique feature called WiFi Streaming that runs a web server designed to be browsed by an iPhone or iPod Touch. You can select shows that have been specifically exported for streaming (not just any show). BeyondTV also has a web interface which lets you view the recording schedule, start export tasks (to WMV, QuickTime, etc.) and change system options. The EyeTV web interface is just for watching shows.

EyeTV gets its program guide from Titan TV. The data is accurate as far as I can tell. The interface fits lots of shows together very well, much better than the BeyondTV over-sized GUI.

Since we have an iMac, we had to go with an external capture device. Fortunately The EyeTV 250 Plus is small and attractive. We were using a Hauppague WinTV PVR-250 with Beyond TV. The quality is comparable. I specifically went for the 250 not just because it can input analog and digital TV, but also because it has on-board compression so the CPU isn't doing all the work when it's recording.

The first version of the software had a bug where encoding shows >1gb would stall. A recent update fixed that, showing Elgato's attention to customer issues. I also had purchased Elgato's Turbo.264 device. But that fails to encode every time. I'm currently in discussion with Elgato support to troubleshoot this. I'll post an update when it's resolved.