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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.
I recently started reading the newsgroup alt.sports.football.pro.gb-packers again just to get up to speed (I just haven't found the time to keep up this off season). It's been a long time since I've read it yet little seems to have changed over the years.
In a discussion about how horrible the ESPN crew was for last weeks Packer pre-season game...
Theismann is paid by the word.
It sure seems that way sometimes.
And from another thread discussing Gilbert Brown's attempt to play with a ruptured right biceps...
Furthermore, if you want to talk about complete wastes of cap space, CH and QC combined are hosing Dallas to the tune of a what, two, three mil this year? A cardboard cutout of Aikman propped up behind center would be just as effective and much cheaper.
I had forgotten just how much fun USENET can be for this kind of discussion. It's often very childish, but pretty fun to watch especially for something like football where people who like to be annoying have ample chance to do so.
Did you ever screw up while signing something important? Made a giant mess signing using the new digital ink signature systems (ugh!) orjust idly wonder what would happen if you signed whatever you felt like on your credit card slips?
Thankfully, someone has already done the initial research! Here's a pretty funny example of what you might encounter.
We're back from a rather long jaunt through Northern California. It's nice to be back home. Adam is with us and has said that he's really looking forward to sleeping in his own bed after many weeks in a dorm.
We hit:
I'll have more to say later and a whole bunch of pictures.
