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| EyeTV For a few months now I've been playing around with my digital video recorder for Mac OS X called EyeTV. Basically, EyeTV is a box that hooks into your cable signal and then to your computer via a USB cable. Your computer must run the supplied software to watch, and record, television. You can also program the device to record shows days, weeks, or months in advance. This is done either manually or via Titan TV using a really cool interface. Think Tivo minus the television.
The good: I can EyeTV shows and add to my archive never having to fear of loosing them. After such shows as "Space: Above and Beyond", "Harsh Realm", and "The Others" were canceled I had to buy copies of these shows on eBay to complete my collection. (For some reason I never did tape these shows while they were on the air.) Heck, I'm still looking for copies of the defunct series "Strange Luck." With EyeTV I don't have to worry about loosing these shows forever. Currently I'm "EyeTVing" such shows as "Firefly", "Scrubs", "The Simpsons", "Malcolm in the Middle", "Freaks and Geeks", and "Sports Night" to name a few. My archive grows weekly and has been getting quite large since the new television season started. I've also been able to transfer shows that I've taped on VHS, "Greg the Bunny" and "Undeclared", and transfer them to EyeTV by hooking my VCR into the device and then playing the tape and recording on my EyeTV at the same time. Oddly enough, this has the similar feeling of when I used to transfer records to tape back in the 80's. Old to new. The bad: EyeTV would be even better if it gave me the option of saving the file in a format other than MPEG1 which seems to be uneditable by QuickTime. A thirty minute show that's been EyeTV'd weighs in at around 350 megabytes. That means I can fit two half hour shows or one hour long show on a CD. Anything longer than an hour, larger than 700 meg, can't be burned onto CD. I'd love to record episodes of "MST3K" onto my computer but can't without splitting the show into two segments and onto two CD's. Without the option of editing whatever EyeTV records is the end product that I don't have as much control over as I'd like. I'd love to edit the shows down, cut the commercials out and make the file into something other than a MPEG1 format. Everything that I've burned to CD still has the commercials on them but you can easily scroll through them without watching. Also, every once in a while EyeTV will stop recording a show after a few moments for some unknown reason. On two occasions I've turned my computer on to see a show I thought was recorded several hours prior only have a few minutes recorded. This is frustrating but a rare occurrence at best. I've heard reports that others have had problems with EyeTV while recording live TV and watching a previously recorded program at the same time. I have yet to have had this problem but I don't watch live TV via EyeTV. I also wish it was easier to burn copies of shows for my PC friends other than by exporting the file through EyeTV in it's "MPG" setting. (It's a small annoyance at best.) Conclusion |
