|
|
The EyeTV from Elgato Systems is a pretty interesting little device.
It's a very simple device with a video tuner and a USB output stream (I believe the MPEG compression happens on the device itself). The included application is somewhat clunky [1] , but it seems to work pretty well for what it is and does. In combination with Watson, it makes a pretty good system for selecting, recording, later viewing and editing television feeds and input from older video cameras that don't do Firewire.
In video recording mode, the system load isn't nearly as high as I had initially believed it to be. I'm sitting here recording and it's eating about 20% of the CPU on a TiBook 667. No fan, no problems. More of the same when playing back saved video, which should come as no surprise, it's just like any other QuickTime media playback.
Unfortunately, it does seem to have trouble doing something I had expected it to do easily, playing live video. Somehow, between streaming the video out and reading it back in, I seem to be utilizing the disk and CPU to the point where the fan has to come on to keep things happy; typing in some applications becomes beyond sluggish and everything just feels like the machine is working too hard. The next test is to see if I can fix some of this by writing to an external Firewire drive, I'm not too hopeful but we'll see. If that fails, I'll try setting the capture buffer size to 0 and see if it can actually play live.
The editing controls aren't too bad. I can edit a one hour show to remove all the commercials (setting two ended markers around the 'bad' content) in about 10 minutes and it takes another 5 minutes or so to compress (basically, re-write the file with all data between markers removed).
I haven't yet looked at the three EyeTV specific files which are written out, but they are pretty tiny. The video data is stored in MPEG-1 format in a .mpg file that can be played directly from QuickTime. The data takes up about 10 MB per minute (e.g. an edited one hour drama drops to slightly more than 43 minutes and uses uses 441 MB).
I think it will probably work really well on a desktop system, and that's something I want to check out, but I'm a little bit down about my lack of success using it as a live TV feed. I just really want to be able to watch live football on my desktop this season.
Notes
There are lots of little Frankenstein type oddities that scream "I don't know the Mac". The app uses ctrl-P to bring up 'Program Window', ctrl-C to bring up the pretty, but hurtful on screen controller, cmd-O to open a new live window by cmd-L to seek to the live spot in a current feed. The program window doesn't support live dragging so I can move around items to suit my taste (it's a Mac, I'm in charge).
Sure it's nit picky, but this silly device cost $200, I want the best my money can buy. Take the on screen controller. Someone obviously spent a lot of time getting this to do what it does. Why? So it can look like the DVD controller in DVD Player? Wrong focus! Give me a standard window with standard controls and hot keys to operate those controls regardless of which window is in front (when the Program Window is frontmost, several controller hotkey features are *cough* missing).
Let's not even get into the channel preference setup. This can only be described as a user interface from hell. It's horrid.
Have you looked at CyTV (http://www.lucid-cake.net/cytv/index_en.html) for streaming live EyeTV broadcasts? With my so-far limited testing it was pretty cool!
Feel free to contact me about anything related to EyeTV. I've had a hard time finding other users to share ideas and information with.
Posted by: Scott J. Kramer on September 19, 2003 03:46 PM commLinkI haven't yet tried out CyTV, but have downloaded it and want to try it out. I plan to install a new (larger) hard drive in my desktop system soon and at that point I'll give it a try.
Have you tried out the new application (1.3)? I didn't see anything particularly appealing, so I didn't bother.
A couple tips from my side...
If watching live TV, getting a couple minutes behind seems to help the entire process run more smoothly. Given the way the system works, you are already 5 seconds or so delayed anyway.
The exported movie files aren't real movies, they're MPEG-1 muxed streams.
The mpg files that are stored in the EyeTV folders can be moved elsewhere and played using QT Player. I sent the presidents address over to my wife's system a couple weeks back and she had no trouble watching it under OS9 (QT 5.x I think).
Posted by: Dave Ely on September 20, 2003 02:20 PM commLinkBack again.
I was in Germany for awhile and haven't had time to try CyTV again since getting home.
I'll be to getting a desktop system soon, probably an iMac tho' I'm trying to be patient for one more Apple hardware announcement or maybe a holiday special, and can leave EyeTV (semi-)permanently attached. Using it with my iBook 600 with a 30GB drive is rather inconvenient.
I've been archiving recordings to a 120GB drive on an old Sun system. I can use GameShark Media Player (aka QCast Tuner) from BroadQ to broadcast them wireless through a PlayStation 2 to the TV/receiver. Or mount the archive directory on my iBook over NFS and play recordings with QuickTime.
I installed 1.3 even tho' it didn't add any new functionality for me. It inspired me to send a note to El Gato expressing my disappointment after such a long delay since 1.2 and giving them a few of my suggestions. Their response was politely encouraging that we'd see at least a few useful enhancements in the future.
I haven't done any demuxing of MPEG-1 audio/video. Working with AIFF and DV would be too tedious (S L O W) on my iBook.
Do you know about the holding [option]-[shift] when clicking Show Info to open the *.eyetvr file in Finder? That's one way of locating a recording's directory. Not sure where I found that trick and wonder if there are others.
And this script has been *very* useful for generating program listings:
http://dev.macperl.org/files/scripts/eyetv
That about exhausts my EyeTV knowledge.
Posted by: Scott J. Kramer on October 30, 2003 05:57 PM commLinkThanks for the additional information Scott.
I was completely unaware of using shift-option-click on show info. Unfortunately, I normally use cmd-I t show info and cmd-shift-option-i doesn't do anything.
The script is pretty handy. I'll add that the next time I update the whole setup.
Posted by: Dave Ely on November 2, 2003 09:02 PM commLinka ready to use PHP script to view all recordings in a web browser is eyetvFTW:
http://www.macware.be/eyetv
