The Cattery

The Cattery

An Eye on the Teev

19 May 2006
Filed under Mac, Technology, Text

With my Aperture rebate, I finally succumbed to a temptation I’ve kept at bay for ages, and picked up an EyeTV for DTT. It is sweet. It takes about three seconds to set up - it’s about three bazillion times easier to tune than my posh German television - and the EyeTV software is pretty good.

For those not familiar with devices like this, here’s a quick rundown: the EyeTV for DTT plugs into your TV antenna and your computer, and basically turns your computer into a TV. When you hit ‘record’, it sucks down quality digital signals into your hard-drive and instantly turns you into a slavering data fiend who speaks in terms of terabytes rather than gigabytes, and knows all the best compression tricks. All those friends you lost when your VCR broke in 1994 will come crawling back with requests for your recording of Friday Night Football or the third episode of Firefly.

Unfortunately, there’s no Australian electronic program guide (EPG) integrated with EyeTV, so some of its true Tivo-like properties can’t be exploited - you basically have to be around to press ‘record’, rather than queuing up all your favourite shows in advance. There’s IceTV, an EPG with a widget that does a pretty neat job of scheduling EyeTV recordings from the Dashboard, but $146 a year is pretty freakin’ steep, I reckon, for something that’s basically a tarted up set of XML feeds, presumably provided by the TV stations rather than lovingly compiled by hand. I’m pretty unlikely to subscribe unless the price drops dramatically (similar services in America and in Europe are FREE). But given that EyeTV features a pretty robust manual scheduling tool, I can’t be too upset about it.

No, the only real problem with this little object is the fact that it’s going to be almost impossible to resist shelling out another couple of thousand bucks for a Mac Mini and related accessories. The only reason I’m holding back is that the Mac Mini, like all of Apple’s other computers, has moronic region-encoding on its DVD drive, meaning that I wouldn’t be able to chuck my DVD player to make space for it. If only they’d fix that (or I were less gutless about fixing the drive myself) I could have the kick-arsest media centre going around, which, for somebody who really doesn’t watch much television, is frankly absurd.

Views from the Floor

Peter says:

There are a few firmware hacks around that allow you to de-region-ify your DVD Drive. Of course, they void your warranty. But I think we're at the stage where that's not so much of a problem.

Go on. Live a little.

Steve Hubbard says:

No need for firmware hacks. Just watch your DVDs and movies via VideoLan [VLC] - it doesn't concern itself with region encodings.

As for the Elgato, I've not purchased one yet for fear of getting absolutely nothing done during the day. Feeds are bad enough, and adding television to the mix would be way too dangerous.

Virginia says:

And also, the firmware hacks only reset the counter - they don't get rid of the encoding altogether, unfortunately. I'd forgotten that about VLC - that's useful to know. I really like Media Central though. I'm not sure how it goes on the region-encoding stuff.

Virginia says:

Hey, check this out: VLC can't get around the region-encoding anymore. Fark.

Speak, friend, and enter


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