Great news for Mac HDTV owners!
EyeTV 500 allows users to watch high-definition television live via free-to-air digital HDTV (ATSC) or unencrypted digital cable TV (Clear QAM) on the Mac; record television to the Mac’s hard drive, creating an archive of with MPEG-2 encoding and sort by various by date, title size and more; “time shift” by pausing live television, rewinding or fast forwarding; edit out unwanted content using EyeTV’s built-in editor that identifies where programs and scenes start and stop; and program EyeTV 500 through the manual control panel or Electronic Program Guide (EPG) from TitanTV.
In addition, EyeTV allows users to export recordings for further editing to applications like iMovie, iDVD or DVD Studio Pro. Programs can also be archived to DVD or Video CD, to create an archived collection that can be played on most standard DVD players. [Macworld]
Initially the EyeTV only recorded OTA(Over the Air), which was not exactly something that interested me since I receive a fairly good number of channels directly through my cable service. I had even checked the TitanTV site to see what I might be able to get if I recorded via OTA and was not that impressed… The addition of cable support is excellent and while the price is higher than you might like to spend, there’s a MacWorld special bringing it down $50 to $249.
I had recently pointed to the EFF’s review of this device and it came away as a solid performer, though requires some heavy lifting to watch full HD on your machine. You can archive to DVD, or edit (and remove any commercials) on your system as well with your choice of video editing software.
I have been interested in this device for awhile and especially now since I also heard this news. Do you have any idea what Clear QAM means? Which cable channels are unencrypted? I imagine each provider decides this on thier own, but can I look for the locals, Discovery and the like? Maybe ESPN? Surely not HBO?
Any ideas? I’ve looked around the web and haven’t found much.
Thank you!
Clear QAM is unencrypted cable… It’s not much to view unfortunately and actually may not even be available from your cable company though they are technically supposed to offer it. If it is available you can expect to find NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, PBS and possibly UPN and WB.
HBO, Discovery, ESPN etc are all cable channels and not broadcast over the air like the rest which would be simply “passed through” on cable though that’s clearly a different signal than one you would receive with an HDTV OTA (Over the Air) antenna.