Has anyone tried Elagato EyeTV?

[tchapin]

Hey there,

I'm wondering if anyone's tried Elegato's EyeTV DVR software. If you have, what do you think?

Thanks.

Todd

[cncb]

No, but I'm curious about it too. Based on the manual, it looks pretty nice. It also looks like you might be able to get some "extender-like" functionality with their UPnP software and some media playback device but I'm not sure how well that would work...

[OneThomas]

I've been looking into it alot... Works with HDHomerun and the new Cable Card Tuner. It will automatically export recordings to iTunes for viewing on the AppleTV devices (or Ipod, or Iphone). Now supports multiple tuners (officially I think). Downside is AppleTV is 720P max, unless I have read incorrectly. The whole Mac thing is very appealing - all the different devices just work together, ability to send things to different devices effortlessly, so on and so forth (even automatically to your iPhone, if you have one).

I currently have nothing Mac or "i" (not even their phone) - still XP (on a 4 year old Quad-core Dell - which is actually rock solid), so I was considering a transition to Mac instead of Windows 7. But after reading all the details of what current media I have on disk that I wouldn't be able to play without conversion or reduced quality - I'm honestly swinging towards Win7 Media Center and Xbox extenders when the day comes SAGE and/or my existing extenders die on me. Conversion to Mac in order to use EyeTV would require an almost complete hardware and software replacement for me. Staying with Windows and using MC would reduce that a bit - and if using Xbox's as extenders - give me almost exactly what I have now. And I really NEVER thought I would say that!
But - Sorry - guess the last part of that was not what you were looking for... :-)

[mistergq]

Interesting.

the major problem with the apple tv is that it can't play bluray mkv files and does not support that many files. ts_video folders need to be converted to a signal mp4 file.

[flavius]

EyeTV was meant to allow you watch TV on your computer and make some recordings while you are away. Over the years they have added multi-tuner support for some devices that share the same EPG, like the HDHomeRun, but you can't have two EyeTV-HD devices, for example, even if they share the same EPG. Was there an official statement from Elgato that they fixed all that? I must have missed it.

I have been using the EyeTV-HD for some time now. It uses the analog hole, just like the HD-PVR. This device allows you to record an iPad profile stream (around 5.0Mbps) and an iPhone stream with 1.3Mbps at the same time which is neat. There is an iPhone/iPad app which works ok.

The iPad profile recordings which I feed directly into my iTunes library look remarkably good when played back through the Apple TV2, but as was said above, it is 720p only. However, I expect 1080p support for the Apple TV some time soon, since the ATV was last refreshed more than a year ago. -But who knows if Apple is going to continue to support that hobby, as Steve Jobs used to call the Apple TV.

Other important limitations are - when used with an extender - is the lack of support for LiveTV and time-shifting, obviously. You have to wait for iTunes to receive the exported file which does not take long, though, when recording using the iPad profile, since EyeTV just has to copy the recording out of the package.

Overall, I have been using EyeTV to supplement my Sage system to reliably record premium channels in HD, and I'm quite happy with it. But I doubt, Elgato will ever turn this into something that could compete with Sage.

[chiledog]

Originally Posted by mistergq

Interesting.

the major problem with the apple tv is that it can't play bluray mkv files and does not support that many files. ts_video folders need to be converted to a signal mp4 file.

Also, ATV2 can't play the HD MPEG2 that is recorded from OTA. You also have to convert them to H264. (I looked into having a jailbroken AT2 running XBMC as a client. I choose against it since I do not want to transcode my PVR recordings to H264 (my PC is a file server PC is a bit old/slow)).

[tchapin]

Very interesting commentary. Thank you.

We only really watch live TV perhaps once a year, on New Year's Eve, so that aspect wouldn't bother me at all.

I love Sage, but I've got 2 MVPs (1 spare that's iffy) and 1 HD200, so if I want any kind of HD and snapiness, I'm going to have to upgrade to something.