But here's where Elgato's otherwise terrific software falls down a bit: Although it provides numerous, simple options for exporting a program to an iPod, iPhone or Apple TV, among others, it doesn't offer an equally simple way to burn a DVD of a recording. You can schedule recordings or pause TV as you want.
(Then again, that remote may not work at all on desktop Macs that reserve their USB ports for the back of the computer.) Oh, and you can use a real keyboard to type your searches too.Ī remote-control onscreen applet lets you change channels, adjust the volume and start and stop recordings, but it has no resemblance to the arrangement of buttons on the physical remote included in the box. Its program guide offers the same kind of point-and-click simplicity that TiVo owners have grown accustomed to, but in an iTunes-esque interface that allows find-as-you-type searching for programs. The EyeTV's best feature, however, isn't its hardware but its software. The EyeTV's tuner picked up about as many channels as the hardware in the TV, but somehow each found one or two stations that the other missed in its first scan (22 and 54 for the EyeTV, 1 and 30 for the TV). This was no trouble to set up on a Mac mini connected to an older HDTV, with the only wait being the brief delay for its setup assistant to finish detecting over-the-air channels. This $149.95 pod plugs into any open USB port and includes software to show you what's playing (the first year of TV Guide updates are free, after which they cost $19.99 a year) and record anything you want. I have, of course, and one of the items I most regret not writing about is a little digital-TV tuner you can plug into a Mac to watch and record live, high-definition TV off the air. As 2009 winds - make that grinds - to a close, I've been looking through my notes to see if I've left any stories unfinished.