So I went to Mac World New York today. Like everyone there, there were two things I wanted to see... Jaguar (OS X 10.2), and El Gato's EyeTV DVR for the Mac.
Jaguar will be well-discussed elsewhere, so let me offer my impressions of my brand new spiffy DVR peripheral.
Pros:
Small, lightweight, USB-Powered, so no wall-wart to worry about
Installation is painless. Connect RF, Connect USB, drag app from CD to Applications folder. Enjoy
Smooth video, even when I was doing other stuff on my 667 TiBook. The system itself hiccuped from time to time (as it is wont to do when doing twelve things at once) but the end-result video seemed to be smooth when played back later.
Generates MPG files that can happily be played with QuickTime, et al.
Cons:
Only supports basic cable (via the RF tuner) or via Composite Video and stereo Audio. This this REALLY needs (a) S-Video in, and (b) a USB-based IR blaster that it can talk to. That way you could plug in the DVR, plug in the blaster, wire a Dish/DirecTV/Digital-Cable box to the DVR via Audio/Video, and let it tune the channel via the IR blaster.
It seems dependent on TitanTV.com for its program listing info. It appears, though, that there's some "industry standard" method that is forming for allowing a TV-guide-page to tell a software app "record this" or "play this live". If that's actually an open and/or published spec, then at least other folks could provide the same functionality if TitanTV was to go tits-up. A pro on this, though, is that the DVR itself can do "just record what's on" (what TiVo refers to as "Boat Anchor Mode", a secret mode programmed into TiVo's to make them useful to users if TiVo were to belly up).
Overall, in the 20 minutes I played with it this evening, I was very impressed with it.
... if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. It is so choice...
- Ferris Bueller
What the fuck is it? You never actually say what it is! A TiVo clone?
It's a USB device that does TiVo stuff, but on a Mac. Saves directly to your hard-drive as an MPG, allows you to select shows to be recorded, etc. etc.
Very cool stuff.