I decided to purchase an EyeTV Hybrid. I was frustrated with the quality of the TV listings software I was using and, from all accounts, the EyeTV software is the best thing you can get on the Mac. I wasn’t able to find the device at any local retailers (of course, *sigh*) so I ordered one from CDW.ca. This took quite a bit longer than I expected, but it finally showed up today and I just hooked it up.
It’s an interesting beast. It uses software decoding, so (unfortunately) it uses significantly more CPU than the old one. On my G5, that works out to be about 25% when just streaming live TV and close to 95% when recording. Note: 95% is fine; max load is 200% on a dual CPU box.
The good news is that the picture quality is significantly better than the old myTV.PVR box (including de-interlacing on the fly, *woot!*), and the software works. Here’s the proverbial “picture worth a thousand”:
The even better news is that, even though EyeTV does not directly support Canadian TV listings, Guillaume Boudreau’s EyeTV EPG Proxy worked perfectly me. One caveat: Setting up the virtual host to fake out data.titantv.com convinced Great Castle Wilson that it’s name was “localhost”. It took me a while to figure how to fix that, but it’s all good now.
There is actually a benefit of using software decoding: There’s almost no delay between the incoming feed and the display when you are watching a live signal. This means that I can also use the EyeTV to hook my PS2 up to my computer monitor, something I’ve wanted to be able to do for a while.
Here is a site that has an IR blaster that apparently works with a Mac.