Elgato releases the tiny EyeTV 250

Elgato, the creators of various software and hardware PVR solutions for the Mac market today released the EyeTV 250.

It only does analog cable/antenna recording, but it does so in a package about the size of an iPod, which is pretty impressive and goes well with the sleek, uncluttered look of most Apple systems. It's $199 and I could see this being a great way to record and load up shows for a video iPod (EyeTV 2 software does this automatically). If I still took a subway to work every day, I'd buy this in a heartbeat to load up The Daily Show and the Colbert Report for my commute each day.

Comments

[Oskar Austegard]

The EyeTV 250 only does MPEG 1 and 2 - no MPEG 4 (or .H264 in Apple-speak). If you want portable media, wouldn't that be more useful?

[Tyler]

I've had a look at this thing and it looks pretty good to me. I use my hook-up my PowerBook to my TV now to watch movies and TV that I have in digital content, so this might be a good solution for PVR capability for me.

I'm not sure how you get the content to your Mac though. The only issue I see with it, is you have to have your Mac sitting beside your cable box while recording. A good solution for a Mini set up for a media center.

[Tyler]

Sorry about the messy post above. Man typo city. I didn't mean to leave in "I'm not sure how you get the content to your Mac." It's USB.

[Matt Haughey]

The recorded video appears to be converted to mp4 by the desktop app. The videos are recorded to your mac in mpeg 1 and 2, but you can setup conversion automatically before adding shows to iTunes (it appears from the site).

[Neil]

It looks like the only PVR for the Mac that can do MPEG4 compression in hardware is the ConvertX from Plextor. That one can do DivX in hardware too. Is there any downside to going with the ConvertX? The Mac version comes with the EyeTV software from El Gato.