EyeTV 250

reviewed by Eddie Hargreaves

Last month I reviewed Elgato's EyeTV EZ, a low-cost analog TV tuner that allows you to watch and record TV on your Mac. Its shortcoming was that it made your Mac do all the hard work of encoding the incoming video signal, putting a hit on your processor and requiring a dual G5 or Core Duo processor for the best quality recordings.

The EyeTV 250 takes nearly everything that's great about the EZ and improves on its main deficiency by using a built-in hardware decoder. I don't have the time to repeat everything I wrote about the EZ model, so if you haven't read that one yet, do so now and know that all of its strengths hold true for the 250. It has the same beautiful, small form factor that matches the design of the Mac mini, but allows you to watch the highest quality video even on a lowly single processor G4. (A 1-hour show, recorded at "Standard" quality, is 720x480 pixels, and uses about 1.9 GB of disk space.) The only real tradeoff is that it requires the use of a (provided) AC adapter, making it more suited for desktop use than portable.

The hardware encoding also makes the 250 more of a true DVR than the EZ by allowing you to pause and rewind live TV, like a Tivo. Making it better than a Tivo is its Mac functionality. Using the bundled EyeTV software (which alone costs $79) the programs you record can be exported to 5th generation video iPods with one click, burned to DVDs with Toast 7, and exported to many video formats such as H.264 or DV format for use with iMovie and Final Cut. Commercials can be removed after the recording is finished using the built-in editor, and specified segments of a recording can be exported to other formats.

Tivo, by contrast, does not allow you to watch, edit, or convert your recorded programs on your Mac. They've promised to enable transfer and playback for about two years and have currently set a date of "mid-2006." Well, it's late June right now but they may consider December 30 as falling within mid-2006.

But the EyeTV 250 is not a complete replacement for a Tivo. First, it cannot change channels on a digital cable box. Second, the remote has only one setting for fast forward/rewind (4x), making the fast-forwarding of commercial breaks tedious. Third, the included remote is adequate, but nowhere near Tivo's superb design (thanks for the batteries, though). And mainly, the EyeTV software interface is not particularly usable on a standard definition television set from couch distance.

But on a computer display, Elgato's EyeTV software, (a Universal Binary currently at version 2.2.1) is incredibly functional and elegant. If anyone is waiting for Apple to produce TV software this good, they need to stop.

As if its DVR capabilities weren't enough, the EyeTV 250 has other strengths. It can turn your VHS tapes into DVDs using the included Composite and S-Video adapter cable and simple-to-use VHS Assistant. You can also turn on Game Mode, which disables the hardware encoder to let you use your Mac as a display for a game console and recording your game play.

With an extensive list of export presets and file formats, the EyeTV software itself is incredibly useful. Together with the 250 hardware encoder, it's a compelling package. And at only $50 more than the software encoding EZ model, it's inarguably a bargain.