Elgato EyeTV: a must have for any Mac HTPC

Any HTPC worth its salt needs to be able to handle broadcast TV, and I've got no big surprises here... anyone even remotely interested in Mac-based HTPCs will have heard of Elgato and their range of EyeTV devices. They offer a number of different USB sticks to enable live TV to be displayed, recorded and time-shifted on Macs. I bought an EyeTV Diversity which I'd highly recommend over the other devices in the range; it provides two aerial inputs and dual tuners to allow recording one channel while watching another. Pretty much a minimum requirement for any PVR if you ask me! You don't need two separate aerials or even an aerial splitter to set this up; everything you need to hook up a single aerial comes in the box.



Live TV is displayed in a window which can be expanded to full screen, and the chunky interface is fully compatible with the Apple remote. Elgato make their own remote, but I much prefer the simplicity of the Apple remote (as long as another piece of software is thrown into the mix - more on Remote Buddy in a later post).

The Elgato software is very slick, as long as you're using a Mac. If you're on Windows, you can still use the kit with a third party application shipped on the same CD, but I tried it out on a Windows 7 box (more on that box later :) ) and to be honest it was awful. On Mac however you're using Elgato's own in-house software which is as slick and polished as it comes. It has a nice big UI, and you can do everything you want straight through the on screen menu system using a remote control. You can also whip out a mouse and use a more typical interface too, should the remote control operation get a bit tiring.

TV listings require an account on a listings website, and a 12 month subscription is included in the box. After a bit of research, I found it is possible to substitute in a free listings service when the subscription expires.

Recording programs out to hard disk is fairly space-intensive, running around about 2GB for an hour. They are stored as MPG files which can be played back either through Elgato's software or through any other MPG playback system, such as XBMC and Air Video. The latter of these is covered in another post, but it's worth bringing up here as Elgato's software allows you to export recordings to an iPhone friendly streaming format. Now, running this on my old Mac mini was not a lot of fun; the transcoding is pretty heavyweight and brought my system to its knees. Elgato sell a hardware accelerator USB stick snappily named the Turbo 264 HD 1080p Video Encoder/Accelerator to offload the majority of the work from the processor, but it costs a pretty penny. The best tip I can give you is to download Air Video Server by InMethod. They sell an accompanying iPhone client called Air Video (for a measly £1.79 last time I checked) and the two pieces of software together allow you to stream any video out to the iPhone via Wifi or 3G, whether you've transcoded it in advance or doing it on the fly. The performance hit is nowhere near that of Elgato's transcoding, so this is absolutely the way to go in my opinion. More on Air Video in another post, but suffice to say, leave that "Prepare all new recordings for iPhone access" option unchecked for now ;)

The general iPhone access however is well worth enabling, and go and install the Elgato EyeTV iPhone app. It will let you review your recordings, schedules and guides on the go. Never get caught out missing a program again!

Anyway, there's probably a ton more I could say on EyeTV, but I've written enough for now and Family Guy is on in a window next to this which is incredibly distracting but infinitely more entertaining :)