Mac PVR Coming Soon

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.

Re:Whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um. Quicktime and other video display are actually extremely snappy on Mac OS X, and at any rate have nothing to do with Quartz. Quicktime actually *bypasses* Quartz. Quicktime and OpenGL actually have special optimized hooks that allow them to talk directly to the display server without having to use display pdf as an intermediary. Look, you can read about it here. [apple.com]

Re:Apply Capture?

[pudge]

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 problem with MPEG-1

[benwaggoner]

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.

Two deceptions in the lead:

[Johnny Mnemonic]

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

[robertchin]

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.

The difference is...

[chris_martin]

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.

None of these PC devices have nailed it

[bitmason]

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.

Re:USB? Ick.

[jht]

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.

-

USB = plenty of bandwidth for compressed data

[Fencepost]

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.

Re:Cool

[MatSimpsk]

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."

More information

[ruiner13]

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!