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.

Let's hope they do a better job than ATi

[Clue4All]

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.

Re:USB? Ick.

[dthable]

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.

Poor-Man's DVD Recorder

[Nomad7674]

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.

HELLO, ANYBODY THERE???

[Derek Smalls]

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!

Apple Home Entertainment System

[medcalf]

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.

Re:USB 2.0?

[Lysander Luddite]

Except no shipping Macs use USB 2.0. Maybe it will in the future, but not now.

quicktime broadcaster?

[jeffehobbs]

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

Re:USB? Ick.

[cdrj]

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.

[jht]

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.

[foobar104]

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.

Re:WRONG WRONG, no, and WRONG.

[foobar104]

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.