EyeTV expands to EyeHome
Elgato Systems, makers of EyeTV, a sort of USB hardware and software TiVo/SnapStream for the mac platform has released a bunch of new products for this week of MacWorld and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
EyeHome is a new magic box that streams photos, music, video, and movies from your mac to your TV. I only does MPEG and DivX, so quicktime or raw DV output from iMovie won't work. It comes with a remote and all the standard home theater hookups, and looks like it has all the features most other media centers have, except it uses Apple's rendezvous network protocol to share media files from macs.
Their EyeTV line looks like it has expanded with a model for regular tv, one for digital satellite, one for HDTV over the air broadcasts, and all sporting firewire interfaces and the ability to dump recordings to DVD. The HDTV one looks the most interesting, I'd love to know what kind of storage and processor is required to record much hi-def content.
I have been looking for exactly the same thing for Windows Server 2003 surprisinly.
Posted by: Bon Bon | January 06, 2004 at 07:54 PM
I'm wondering what the video quality will be with the new EyeTV 200, which is using MPEG-2 now. I had resisted purchasing this device because of the low video quality and because of the inability to serve it easily to my TV. Now with the EyeHome and the MPEG-2 compression this becomes a compelling alternative to TiVo with no subscription for now.
I'll be interested in reading some reviews of these guys as they come out.
Posted by: craig | January 07, 2004 at 01:11 PM
The EyeTV400 doesn't do HDTV; it does DVB-T. DVB is the MPEG-based standard that Dish and DirecTV use for satellite broadcasting; in some areas, there are terrestrial over-the-air broadcasts that use it, which is what this is for. The EyeTV300 is the same basic guts, only it can receive free-to-air (FTA) satellite signals encoded with DVB.
Posted by: paul | January 08, 2004 at 02:41 AM
Elgato customer support emailed me that EyeTV 200 uses full-frame NTSC (704 x 480)which is four times the original EyeTV (352 x 240)
Posted by: Bill | January 09, 2004 at 09:14 AM
the eyetv 300 & 400 are PAL versions for europe. the only ones available in the US are the 200 and original USB version. the eyetv 200 is close to DVD quality at 30 fps at 6Mps.
Posted by: m | January 10, 2004 at 09:29 PM