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Review: EyeTVReviewed By: Kirk Hiner Review Date: November 10, 2002
There was a brief period in my life, a period of about five months, when I lived in beautiful downtown Hoboken, New Jersey. Hoboken is the butt of many jokes, mainly from people who have never been there, I assume. It's a quaint little town on the Hudson River, which really only deserves to be mocked for two reasons: its completely obnoxious parking restrictions and its completely obnoxious bar scene. With no car to park and no need to get drunk, I quite liked Hoboken. I quite liked my apartment, too. It was long and thin and was a perfect place to kill a Sunday afternoon watching football. There, I had the computer set up in the living room so I could turn on the game while getting some work done. Ah, the TV and the computer in the same room. Those were the days. Now, I'm married, and have since been taught that the living room perhaps isn't the best place for a computer. Ends up the pinball machine and the poster of the nude bicycle race from Queen's Jazz album don't belong there, either. Who knew? In my house 500 miles from Hoboken, there's not much space in the computer room for a TV. There also aren't many outlets. Seems that in 1929 when my home was built, people didn't need more than one outlet per room (I wonder what that lifestyle must have been like). So, how can I watch some Cartoon Network and still get all these Applelinks reviews written? EyeTV.  EyeTV is a digital video recorder that allows you to bring in a video signal--either through RF or RCA inputs--to your computer via USB. Quite the little workhorse that USB has become, wouldn't you say? With the RF input, you can run cable television direct. The RCA inputs are good for VHS, analog camcorders, DVD and such. I'm somewhat disappointed there's no S-video input, however, as with Eskape Labs' MyVideo. But EyeTV gains back its advantage by transferring the audio over USB along with the video. Very handy, considering MyVideo forces users to import the audio through a separate audio input, requiring either a very old Macintosh or a third-party device such as Griffin's iMic.
EyeTV, being a USB device, is a cinch to set up. Plug it in, install the software, and you're done. I found it odd that the EyeTV Setup Assistant asked if I intend to use the RF or RCA inputs, or both, and I couldn't find an explanation of what the advantage would be of selecting just one over both. Otherwise, no problem. Upon launching EyeTV, the software did a quick scan of my cable line to see what channels I could pull in. Although my digital cable gets me something just shy of 397,000 channels, I believe, EyeTV maxes out at 124. After it finds the channels, you can go in and customize to delete MTV and all the home shopping channels, and you can label those that remain for easier identification. Now, with all that in place, you're set to watch some television. EyeTV allows you to watch the video at normal, half, small, and maximum size, along with full screen (or any other size, really, since the screen can be dragged to any size you want). I found half size to be the best option, as it's large enough to see what's going on but doesn't show the obvious compression artifacts you get at the larger options; even normal size looks pretty messy, EyeTV's only major drawback.
Once the program is recorded to your system, you can watch it at your leisure or burn it to a video CD with a program such as Roxio's Toast 5 Titanium. Aside from handy archiving, video CDs can also be played in most DVD players. An hour of EyeTV video takes up about 650MB of hard disk space at standard video CD quality, so you're fine for recording a couple episodes of a TV show. If, however, you want to keep the entire season of Buffy in your collection, you'll need to burn some CDs. EyeTV still isn't finished, though. It also bring along all those those TiVo things that allow you to rewind and pause "live" television, skip commercials, and I think even place the participants of The Bachelor in Quake III: Arena for enhanced entertainment value. And hey, get this. If you have the Keyspan Digital Media Remote, you won't even need to worry about using EyeTV's software remote. Heck, get yourself a beer and some chips and you can turn your computer room into the new den, relinquishing control of the couch to the dog. Everyone's happy. Well, except that neither the Keyspan Remote nor the EyeTV remove have a last channel button. And during football season, I needs me my last channel button What I like best about EyeTV, however, and this may be an OS X thing, is that the signal plays without hiccups even while in the background. You can keep all of your fancy pausing and skipping and technological chicanery, I just want to be able to watch TV while I work. EyeTV provides that ability, so I'm good. And now, I won't have to move back to Hoboken.
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Actually, it's probably unfair to compare EyeTV to MyVideo; they're designed to do different things. MyVideo's main function is to bring in analog video and shoot it back out to tape, which it does quite well. EyeTV is content to let you keep the video on your hard drive or burn to video CDs, which it also does quite well. So, let's focus on that.
Unlike most devices that allow you to watch TV on you computer, EyeTV actually looks to enhance your TV watching (I'm not convinced that's a lofty goal). It works along with this