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Mac PVR Coming Soon

Posted by pudge on Tue Jul 16, 2002 10:11 AM
from the must-get-new-toy dept.
Businesses Media Media (Apple) Apple
mgrochmal writes "One of the items bouncing around the rumor mills is EyeTV, a TiVo-like device for Apple computers. Made by El Gato Software, it hooks up to one of the Mac's USB ports and captures MPEG-1 video, with a choice between a VideoCD-compatible recording, or a higher quality recording. You can read about a preview build of it, as well as read a comparison between it and a TiVo." It doesn't come with a hard drive; and here I was, thinking I wouldn't fill up my new 160GB hard drive any time soon. Silly me.
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  • ATi has marketed a couple of their cards with TiVo-like capabilities, and they are awful. It's not a driver issue this time (a first for ATi), but the software iself is crappy and unreliable. Without a Mac it won't do me much good, but it's nice that someone's going to give it another go.
    • My TV burned up 4 years ago, and thanks to ATI. VirtualDub, and recently GATOS gatos.sourceforge.net I haven't seen a commercaial or an annoying network logo for YEARS. Maybe you just stuck with the CRAP software that ATI ships, I haven't. 5 mins of clipping, 15 mins of processing, and an annoying 60 minutes of TV turns into 40 mins of unfettered joy. And I get to keep it for those dull TV nights! Ted Turner can kiss my ass!
    • How does bad bundled software make the cards awful? Although I haven't found the ATI TV tuner bundled software to be unreliable, it isn't as full-featured as the standalone PVRs. But, since there's a fair amount of better WDM-compatible PVR software out there, it's not like you're stuck with the quality of ATI's bundled solution...

  • USB? Ick. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Space Coyote (413320) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:15AM (#3894415) Homepage
    Give me FireWire, please. MPEG-1 video quality isn't going to cut it on a Mac, I'm afraid.
    • USB has more than enough bandwidth for a TV video and audio signal.

      I SO want one of these, seeing them just yesterday on their website. A friend's dad just got one for HIS Mac, and loves it, rejoicing in being able to get rid of his TiVo ;)
      • USB has more than enough bandwidth for a TV video and audio signal.

        You're kidding, right? Maybe if it's compressed...and given the way USB was designed, I wouldn't expect to be able to do much with your computer while it's capturing. For an external gadget, FireWire would've been much better. DV would be a better capture format than MPEG; it's more easily edited (which is good for cutting ads out of stuff you want to archive). Sony has a device that converts analog video (composite or S-video) to DV and puts it out on FireWire...add a computer-controlled tuner to it and you'd be all set.

        (Do Macs have AGP slots? If they do, why couldn't someone drop in any old video card that the rest of us use? Failing that, I know most of 'em do PCI, and you can still find video cards and capture cards that use PCI. I capture to Huffyuv-compressed AVI (720x480, 29.97 fps) with an All-In-Wonder Radeon. The video goes to MPEG only after all the ads are edited out.)

        • Re:USB? Ick. (Score:3, Interesting)

          by foobar104 (206452)
          Of course the video would be compressed. By some standards, 8 Mbps MPEG-2 is broadcast quality (for SD, of course), so the 12 Mbps bandwidth of the USB connection is way overkill.

          And as for DV, at 25 Mbps it's about five times the bandwidth that a consumer piece of gear should have to deal with. If it weren't 4:1:1*, it'd be better than DVD in a lot of ways.

          An inexpensive consumer PVR really only needs to deal with MPEG-2, at bit rates around and below 4 Mbps. Anything more than that is too dang much.

          * This notation refers to the number of samples taken from each color component channel. TV is expressed in the YUV color space, meaning one channel of luminance (a black-and-white signal, essentially) and two channels of color. It's not like RGB where each color is a primary hue, so don't bother trying to think of it that way. The very best way to sample is 4:4:4, or four samples per cycle of each channel. A good compromise is 4:2:2, or twice as many luminance samples as color samples. This maintains both good image resolution and good color resolution. DV samples at 4:1:1, which means the colors are ``squashed.'' Two shades that are close to one another on the uncompressed video will come out of the DV process as the same hue. So DV, despite its high bit rate, isn't quite good enough for broadcast work. At least, that's the prevailing opinion among the folks I work with.
                • So... after I tried to explain, without ambiguity, that I have nothing to say about the EyeTV thingy specifically, you decided to just hop up and down on the same point again? That's no fun.

                  Let me just put the last nail in this particular coffin. I don't know everything, but I work with broadcast video every day, so I have some working knowledge at least. We're talking about the width of the pipe, here, and that's all. I have seen a USB hard drive sustain reads of about 900 KB per second for an hour, so it's clear that USB is capable, in the most literal sense, of sustaining transfers in excess of 10 Mbps. Since you can squeeze an awful lot of broadcast-quality video into 10 Mbps, USB is therefore not inherently unsuited to compressed video transport.

                  You seem to be arguing-- for reasons that baffle me-- that the fact that the video must be compressed outside the computer sucks and that only internal, software-based compression is okay. Based on the rack of SD and HD MPEG-2 encoding gear in my lab at the office, I'd have to call ``bullshit'' on that assertion. As I've said before, I have never seen a professional application of a software-based real-time MPEG-2 encoder, so I can't really form an opinion. But they're conspicuous by their absence, I think.

                  I mean, let's put this in perspective. There are two kinds of compressed video: broadcast quality, and horseshit. On that scale, everything I've ever seen south of a Minerva VNP is horseshit, and that includes both USB encoders and consumer PCI cards.

                  You find the variety of horseshit compressed video you can squeeze out of your PC to be acceptable, but you find the kind you can get out of the EyeTV widget to be unacceptable. That's a valid opinion, and I respect it. But don't let that develop into a superiority complex. It's still horseshit.

    • Re:USB? Ick. (Score:5, Informative)

      by jht (5006) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:36AM (#3894625) Homepage Journal
      I think for the design goal, MPEG-1 should be fine (it's just a cruddy NTSC signal, after all), but I'm not nuts about using USB for yet another device. I've already got enough USB devices, and some play nicely with a hub and some don't. USB is almost the second coming of SCSI as far as voodoo goes.

      Just as an example, on my TiBook 667 I have 2 USB ports. On them are:

      Port 1 - a MacAlly external keyboard and MS optical Intellimouse.
      Port 2 - Belkin 7-port powered USB hub.

      Then, attached to the hub I have a Palm USB adapter, one of those Griffin iKnobbie things (it's useless, but cool) a Microtech Smartmedia/CF reader, and a gamepad. But I also have several devices that'll ONLY work when either hooked up to the free port on the keyboard or directly attached to the PowerBook:

      -DiskOnKey (128MB)
      -Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX
      -Olympus D-3000 digital camera
      -Compaq iPaq 3765

      So not only are my USB ports pretty darned busy, but I have devices that'll only work in a particular order and/or port. OTOH my Firewire port has only two devices that I connect, and then only when needed: an external hard drive and a Canon DV camcorder. And I could always get a Firewire hub if I needed one.

      In general, most people are using their Firewire ports less, and if/when El Gato attacks the PC market there's a decent (and growing) number of PC's with that port (or you can add one for about $30). For their application, I think Firewire would have been a better choice.

      -

      • Re:USB? Ick. (Score:2, Interesting)

        by cdrj (556227)
        What exactly is a Griffin iKnobbie thing? I tend to like useless and cool things, but I couldn't find what you were talking about.

        • Re:USB? Ick. (Score:2, Interesting)

          by jht (5006)
          It's the Griffin PowerMate [griffintechnology.com], but at the time I couldn't remember the name of it (and I'm at work, so it isn't in front of me).

          I thought iKnobbiething was a good stand-in under the circumstances... In fact, maybe there's a market for a device with that kind of name!

      • Re:USB? Ick. (Score:2, Interesting)

        by dthable (163749)
        Most PC users should start seeing IEEE 1394 in the near future. Sony is really pushing to use it with their new digital hub like PCs and in their products. Besides, now that the Mac users have paid with their first born for FireWire devices, the market is prime for PC cheapskates to pick up on our trend.

  • USB? What were they thinking? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by guttentag (313541) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:25AM (#3894501) Journal
    it hooks up to one of the Mac's USB ports and captures MPEG-1 video... and here I was, thinking I wouldn't fill up my new 160GB hard drive any time soon. Silly me.
    I have a USB TV Tuner (Eskape's MyTV, which produces abysmal video) that requires separate hardware for the audio because USB couldn't handle full-screen video plus audio. If the maker of this PVR is trying to squeeze video and audio into a USB (not USB 2) cable, I imagine the quality will be even worse.

    This doesn't make any sense. If the Macintosh is really the target platform for this, why didn't they use Firewire? All current Macs ship with Firewire (even the $799 G3 iMac).

    • USB is adequate for streaming MPEG-1 video & audio - most of those cheap USB TV tuners just send the raw video stream becuase they don't have hardware MPEG encoders.
    • As someone else has also pointed out, running uncompressed video over USB is a problem, but if you have a box that's doing hardware compression and just sending the compressed file over USB for storage then you shouldn't have any problems.

      The review mentions that the standard (only?) compression results in about 650MB of data for each hour of recording. Basing an estimate of USB bulk data transfer capacity on the fact that you can get 4x USB CDR drives, this thing is only using approximately 1/4 of the capacity of a USB connection.

  • I can see the disclaimer on the Commerical now... (Score:4, Funny)

    by motardo (74082) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:27AM (#3894526)
    I remember on the iPod commercial at the end and in very small print (like any disclaimer) it said "Please don't steal music". I wonder what it'll say now, probably "Don't steal anything disney related or we will hunt you down and shove lilo and stitch related crap down your throats"

  • The problem with MPEG-1 (Score:5, Informative)

    by benwaggoner (513209) <ben,waggoner&microsoft,com> on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:27AM (#3894529) Homepage
    Alas, MPEG-1`is a lousy format for PVR use of any quality. MPEG-2 only stores video as progressive scan. However, TV is broadcast as interlaced, where the even lines are captured 1/59.94th of a second off from the odd lines. The difference between fields includes half of the video compression information.

    Since MPEG-1 can't store data like this, one of the two fields will have to be discarded before capturing. This means you'll lose half of the temporal information automatically. This will leave anything originally shot of film looking jerky on playback, and anything shot on video less "present."

    Good PVR systems use MPEG-2, which can store fields. There are good MPEG-2 hardware cards for Mac, even, that they could use instead. Heck, a Dual G4 can encode MPEG-2 in software in significantly faster than real time with the DVD Studio Pro Codec.
    • It stores it as MPEG-1 so it's easy to burn to a VideoCD for storage and playback on my DVD players.

    • Poor-Man's DVD Recorder (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nomad7674 (453223) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:38AM (#3894645) Homepage Journal
      Keep in mind that the selling point here is NOT just a PVR. If all you want is a PVR, it would be just as good to invest in a Tivo or ReplayTV unit which is dedicated and, as you say, provides higher-quality video. This is also a VCR replacement by providing a cheap way to both record programs in a PVR-style and then save them to a cheap disk-based media. With this unit and Toast, you can easily record your favorite Simpsons episodes, then burn then to a VCD for playing on your DVD player. It makes it sort of a poor-man's DVD recorder (since component DVD recorders are still in the $1000+ range).

      This is why my brother is looking hard at buying an EyeTV. Course, he could also look for a solution with a DVD-burner built into it and a MPEG-2 encoder card, but that costs a lot more than the $200 he would be spending to add this to his exiting iMac + External DVD-burner setup.

    • Maybe this is an ignorant question, but why not just de-interlace the video before compressing it? De-interlacing NTSC-resolution video is a fairly trivial task in the digital realm, although I admit I would have no idea how to go about it with an analog signal.
    • Might it be possible that the h/w is performing some sort of basic deinterlacing to get around this?

      That said, MPEG-2 would be the best approach.

      Or even better, if someone released Bt8x8 drivers for OS X - Then you'd be able to use one of the many PCI tuner cards which give FAR better performance at a lower price.

      Shouldn't be that hard... Just a matter of someone porting the BTTV drivers...
  • I can do video capture on my Mac in iMovie with a DV bridge, without even using a special video capture card; that doesn't make my Mac a PVR... does it?
    • Set up a cron job to record the simpsons when you're not at home and you've got everything this does. (assuming you have a way of tuning a TV signal, of course)
      • cron jobs in OS9? :)

        Yes, I know there's cron-type software out there... could probably write an applescript for it, too. But, I'm not running OS X on the box I'm doing the video stuff on, since it won't play nice with the SOnnet G4 upgrade.

  • Two deceptions in the lead: (Score:3, Informative)

    by Johnny Mnemonic (176043) <mdinsmore@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:29AM (#3894545) Homepage Journal

    This is not a rumor; this is an announced, real, for-sale-today product. www.elgato.com.

    This will work with a Mac, but is not an Apple product. Just to be clear.

  • Not a Rumor (Score:5, Informative)

    by robertchin (66419) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:29AM (#3894551) Homepage
    Well, I hate to break it to you, but this is not a rumor. See: http://www.elgato.com/eyeTV/index.html [elgato.com] for more details.
      • Well, it's not coming out of apple, it's from a third party. It's basically the same thing that has been out for several years on the PC (on the fly MPEG-1 converter, such as the one made by Dazzle), with the addition of scheduled recording and a TV guide. I don't think MPEG-1 requires that much bandwidth, Dazzle made a device that transferred data over the parallel port!

  • None of these PC devices have nailed it (Score:4, Informative)

    by bitmason (191759) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:35AM (#3894609) Homepage
    The difference between a Tivo and all of the PC hardware/software combinations is like night and day. Tivo (usually) just works and fundamentally lets you break away from being tied to program schedules.

    By contrast all the PC software that I've tried is still fundamentally based on pointing at a programming ggrid and asking the software to record something. That's when it works. I've had a lot of problems with, not only drivers, but also the software itself doing things like having problems recording adjacent programs -- to say nothing of crashing on a fairly regular basis.

    I've come to believe that we'll move toward having a "digital entertainment center" that may be (hopefully will be) based on as open an architecture as possible but will be optimized for specific types of entertainment-related functions as opposed to general computing. We all like the idea of this infinitely hackable, totally open computer device, but -- at least for now -- I think Tivo has demonstrated rather convincingly that specialization has some advantages too.
  • USB is not going to cut it for quality video and audio. Really isn't a PVR as much as it is a toy. I was excited, at first, when I heard rumors of the device but I was hoping for a Firewire device. I expect "ElGato" will have a bunch of these puppies sitting in pallets in their warehouse for a long time.

    My major beef with Mac OS X right now is no TV-in card. I like to have CNN/CNBC/Fox News in a little window running while I type away at my work. With a three monitor Mac system, I have plenty of places to put that window. I have an ATI All-In-Wonder card that works beautifully in Mac OS 9 but has no drivers for Mac OS X and ATI doesn't give a damn if it ever does. It just runs one of the monitor like a plain RagePro 128. Which is fine, because I will never buy another card from ATI nor will my business until ATI provides TV-in/out drivers for the All-In-Wonder for Mac OS X. Unfair? Maybe so, but I am the customer, so I am always right. Nvidia is now my sole Mac Video Card supplier.

  • I just hope it is compatible with European TV signals...

    • Re:Cool (Score:3, Informative)

      by MatSimpsk (580539)
      From the FAQ on their website [elgato.com]:

      "Q. Does EyeTV support PAL format and work internationally?

      A. Not yet. EyeTV currently only supports NTSC format for use in North America."

  • Apple Home Entertainment System (Score:3, Interesting)

    by medcalf (68293) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:43AM (#3894681) Homepage
    OK, so you take an iMac (or a G4 tower or even a PowerBook), hook up one of these gadgets as an input and a digital TV that takes a SVGA hookup as an output. Hook the audio out to the big speakers. All that's needed is a good AM/FM tuner card, and you could get rid of the entire audio component stack (other than the turntable) and the DVD player.

  • save your money and get a 7500/7600 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by smagoun (546733) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:46AM (#3894704) Homepage
    I have a Powermac 7600, which shipped with built-in RCA audio + video inputs, as well as an S-Video input. The video quality is excellent (for a consumer device), and it does full-screen (640x480) playback without any of the ugliness I've seen from most USB capture devices. Granted, this new doodad seems to do MPEG-1 encoding on the device, but I'll take a raw stream over MPEG any day.

    So that's the video input part, on a machine that's 6+ years old. The Tivo part can be done with a bit of script magic (Applescript, perl, whatever) or tools like BTV from bensoftware [bensoftware.com]. You can encode to MPEG/cinepak/whatever on the fly, or later on. If you don't need the Tivo part, Apple's software does a good job of recording things.

    Total cost is about $50 these days, and I'll bet the quality is better.


    • Total cost is about $50 these days

      The only problem with that scenario is that the 7500/7600 had only SCSI on the motherboard, so you'd probably also want/need to slap an IDE card in there so you could use large cheap IDE drives -- and that factor runs up the cost appreciably.

      ~jeff
  • In the never ending MS vs. Apple game of "Dueling Banjos", this sounds similar to Microsoft's "Freestyle" [microsoft.com] version of XP (aka XP Media Center). Without violating an NDA, I will say that Freestyle is a pretty slick product but doesn't compare to my TiVo. It did finally give me an easy way to play MP3 in the living room though, something I've been too lazy to put together myself. The hardware specs include MPEG-2 encoding card, TV-out connection, firewire, USB, DVD-ROM, CDRW, remote control. It's certainly nothing one of us couldn't do with any PC though.

  • quicktime broadcaster? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jeffehobbs (419930) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @11:02AM (#3894840) Homepage

    http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/broadcaste r/ [apple.com]

    QuickTime Broadcaster not only encodes video in real-time to MPEG-4 over a network, but will also save a file to disk as well. And the app is AppleScriptable! -- so the only problem now is getting the video (tuned to the appropriate channel) into the machine at the right time. Too bad there's no cheap PCI TV tuners for the Mac...

    I've got to think that this approach -- and the El Gato "PVR" for that matter -- is vastly inferior to a "set-it-and-forget-it" tivo.

    ~jeff
    • Too bad there's no cheap PCI TV tuners for the Mac...

      Speaking of which, how hard would it be to port some of the video4linux code over to Darwin/BSD anyway? Seems like a weekend job for someone who knows a little about how Darwin works..

  • I've had an old ixMICRO TV tuner card in my B/W G3 for a couple of years. Works well, but has a slight problem in that the company that made it went belly up, and there is no Mac OS X software for it.

    Since then, there were next to ZERO Macintosh TV tuners out there for Mac OS X use. ATI appears to have one, but its feature set is limited. Eskape Labs has been working on its MyTV OS X software for over a year now, and was in the running for my money until EyeTV showed up.

    A USB TV tuner is a good fit. It doesn't suck up a precious PCI slot. It can be moved to any computer with cable hookup and USB. Works great with older or laptop Macs. Fits everyone I need for my new home.

    The PTR features are a bonus, but will be very much appreciated. The price can't be beat, either. Competitive products will cost up to $1000 since they have internal hard drives. EyeTV appears to balance the abilities of the Mac with the features of a basic PTR.

    The RCA video inputs also allow you to use the computer as a quickie display for today's game consoles such as PlayStation, or a basic video input for your camera.

    Not a bad price at $199 (during Macworld, only $179), and the product quality looks good. While FireWire may seem a logical choice, it's overkill--USB has more than enough bandwidth. The only thing you need is to keep some drive space clear.
  • The biggest problem with the EyeTV is not its choice of USB over Firewire but its lack of RCA/S-Video outputs. I don't want to watch TV on my computer!

    From what I've heard the software is top notch, free TV guide, ability to pause live TV, etc... but its useless unless you like to watch all of your shows in a tiny window on your computer's screen.

  • More information (Score:4, Informative)

    by ruiner13 (527499) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @11:40AM (#3895111) Homepage
    There is some information lacking in people's comment's i've noticed. First of all, the lower quality setting is compatible with Toast VCD, as it captures at 320 x 240 resolution. This stores about an hour of video on one CD. The unit also has a higher quality setting which they say is "double" the resoultion of the regular video. I assume they mean 640 x 480, which is really 4x resolution, but we'll see. From what i've seen on screen captures of the quality, looks pretty decent. And this unit is different than a regular capture card because it has a cable ready coaxial connector, not just composite and s-video (although it has those too). So, whereas with a standard vid cap card, you'd ned a vcr to tune the stations, this one just hooks up to the wall jack. Seems like a pretty good solution to me!

    I got most of my info from this link: http://www.macintoshdigitalhub.com/reviews/eyetv/i ndex.html [macintoshdigitalhub.com]. Hope this helps clear stuff up!

  • No DRM, no Microsoft! What could be nicer? Now when will the PAL version be coming?
  • With the new harddrives coming out at such large sizes combined with the Superdrive available in the G$ towers, who needs it. Record all week to your HD. Take a couple of hours and write it to DVD. Repeat.

    • Re:Apply Capture? (Score:3, Informative)

      by pudge (3605)
      Well, it is USB, so it is not a card, which means it will work with iMacs, iBooks, PowerBooks that don't have capability to use cards. Other than that, probably not too much different, though I don't know card specs. It mostly just captures the video, converts to MPEG-1, and is controllable via software to some extent (to change the channel or input source, for example), apparently. I sure want to play with one ...

    • The difference is... (Score:4, Informative)

      by chris_martin (115358) on Tuesday July 16 2002, @10:32AM (#3894584)
      That it works on Mac OS X. The PVR space is well covered on wintel, but there isn't anything out there on the Mac. There are tons of video capture cards/devices on the Mac, but nothing (until now) that does PVR with scheduling and such. Plus it does MPEG1 encoding in the box so it'll work on any Mac with USB. Sure, it's not the best by todays standards, but it's lightweight and works. Plus, it's less that $200US so it's a thrid the cost of a ReplayTV or TiVO. It's missing some features compaired to ReplayTV, but not enough to make me want to spend 3 times more for it. Plus, since it creates standard MPEG1 files, I can off load them to CD/HD/whatever and save them as long as I want.
    • I believe they were bone-headed and didn't make drivers.

      Not that it matters, because (as you said) Dazzle has a Firewire based DV bridge (the Hollywood model) that works great. Composite / s-video in and out, just like the usb, only running a much higher thruput with the Firewire. That's what I picked up, and it works great. I can patch it into my vcr and record live tv, too! See my previous comments about my Mac possibly being a PVR ;)
    • Use an existing (cheap) sat tuner and use the composite out. Then you connect a COM port to the data port on the sat tuner, leaving you with just one problem: software support for tuning via the COM port. Maybe they'll include that later in a software update, who knows. That's what the TiVo does anyway.
    • VCD data rates are around 1150 Kbps, and since this device most likely compresses the video on the fly on-board and uploads it to the computer, there's theoretically plenty of bandwidth in the 12 Mbps spec of USB 1.1, even allowing for lots of overhead and other data streams.

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