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When I first bought my iMac G5, I commented that a TV tuner meant that the iMac couldn’t take over in the living room. Since then Apple have launched the Mac Mini, which I think sets out a plan to get in on the living room market.

So a TV tuner would make a lot of sense for either the Mac Mini, or the TV-like iMac G5. Thankfully, Elgato make just such a thing, the eyetv 410. I’ve had one for over a month now, and thought I’d share my opinion on the product. Overview

The eyetv 410 is badged as “truly mobile television on your mac”. I’m not quite sure that “truly mobile” fits the bill, as with the box (which is quite light), cables, antenna and the mac itself, you’ll not have much room in a bag for much else. However, with it’s firewire port giving it all the power it needs at least the power supply isn’t necessary.

To me the most important feature was that it would receive terrestrial digital television, so I could watch everything I could already receive on my old on-digital box. Recording things was secondary. However, as I write this, I have about 15Gb of free disk space, from 90Gb free before I bought it. Go figure

Setup It’s very easy to setup. It really was a case of plugging it in to the firewire socket on your mac (a USB version exists for PC’s I believe), installing the software and “go’. It scans available channels and identifies which channels are available.

Because of the house we’re in, my reception of the initial signals was rather rubbish. That was resolved by plugging in the antenna to a signal booster I had in my box of techie stuff. I’ve recently got another aerial to try out, as the supplied one is little more than a piece of wire with a cable attached.

Scanning for available channels takes a few minutes. It’s then a matter of selecting the channels to watch, and away you go. A few simple keyboard combos (or through the on-screen controller) allows you to easily change the window size.

The system comes with a small remote control, but I’ve been entirely unable to get it working. Possibly due to flat batteries included by default, but I prefer to use the Mac itself for control. It

Programming

In the UK, the eyetv 410 comes with a subscription, valid for a year to tvtv.co.uk, which hooks in to the system reasonably well (once you work out their rather tortuous enabling process: It took me a good 10 minutes to get my account working). This is an internet based TV schedule service: Find the programme you’re interested in, click the record button, and your eyeTV will schedule up to record the program. It does depend on how often your eyeTV is configured to log in and download the requested programmes of course, but as you’re likely to be on your computer when you set them, you can manually check the schedule.

I’ve not yet worked out how to program it to record every programme in a series yet, so I’m still having to ensure I log back in again every few days to check ahead for programmes I want to record or watch.

I suppose I was a bit disappointed that there was no inbuilt software that did just this in some way (quite how, I’m not sure). After a year, I’ll have to fork out about £15 for another year of service. All said, it’s quite a decent service, once you configure it for your region (by default you get the national channels, so if you live in Scotland like me, you need to change BBC1 to BBC1 Scotland. You’ll also need to rename the channels to make sure they match tvtv’s, such that BBC One is BBC 1 if appropriate)

If you don’t want that sort of service though, there is a manual option, which has a decent interface, is every bit as easy to record (to me) as most video or dvd recorders these days.

Day to day use

Most of the time, I just want to watch a spot of TV (such as the channel 4 news as I write this), and it’s simply delightful to have a small window in the corner of my display whilst I work.

The quality is excellent, and when running in a window you don’t honestly notice the higher resolution of an LCD display over a normal CRT television. At full screen you do notice some of the mpeg encoding “wobble” where sections of the image are compressed down: It’s only noticeable if you look closely at slow moving sections of the screen.

You can change channels with the controller dialogue that is usually available on the screen (it can be hidden), and there are short-cuts to change channel, ie. press ‘4′ to change to channel 4 which quickly become useful.

Most funky of all is the ‘pause live-tv’ feature, which any user of digital tv recorders will be used to. Hit the space bar whilst watching a live programme, and it will pause the display, allowing you to go and make a cup of tea and return, without having missed a thing. You can skip forward up to the live broadcast during breaks of course.

Playback of recorded programmes is very easy. Programmes recorded through the online scheduler usually have the name of the programme next to it, as well as the date, so it’s easy to identify what’s what. Double click on it, and it launches.

Programmes can be exported to various formats, but I’ve not really experimented with this. It does take quite a while to transcode into a suitable format for DVD rippers. I prefer to actually just burn a native export of a programme onto a CD or DVD (or just via firewire copy to my laptop booted up as a disk with the mac-t on boot trick) and then run it into the TV through VLC or mplayer X on my Powerbook laptop.

Apple fans might complain that aesthetically it’s b rushed metal look is clunky. I’d agree to a point, before pointing out that most TV’s are box-like and ugly. Given the cables are long enough you can hide it under a desk, it’s really not a problem. But there’s room for improvement.

How much?

I paid £199 via Apple’s UK store, which was between £10 and £20 cheaper than other sites (froogle didn’t help much then either). Shipping was included, which was nice, but - as is sadly the usual case - shipment took a bloody age. Apple really do need to sort out their parcel delivery: It took 15 days to reach me after ordering - much longer than I’d hoped: In hindsight, I’d probably pay more for a guaranteed delivery from a UK based supplier.

In summary…

The EyeTV 410 is a great little box. It does exactly what you’d expect and want, and truly turns the iMac G5 (and - I’d guess - the Mac Mini) into everything you want. It’s a hard disk space guzzler mind, a one hour programme will take up about 2Gb of space.

I only wish the online service at tvtv wasn’t quite as clunky, and had more information further in advance than they currently offer. Although that’s probably outside the control of them due to the broadcasters only releasing the details late on, it’s missing some key features such as recording based on series preference, and possibly (although I’d not use it) pre-emptive recording along the lines of TiVo.

For sheer quality and flexibility of the technology, it’s excellent: 8/10 Technical features, it’s software is missing a couple of nice-to-haves, but is otherwise excellent: 9/10 For appearance, it’s clunky and boxline: No sleek white Apple colours: 6/10 Online service, it’s frustrating to use at first, but functional: 6/10

Overall, 8/10 - Whilst there is clearly room for improvement, the eyetv 410 a great addition to any mac setup in a home context, who want to make wider use for their kit.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2005 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.