Miglia TVMini HD

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Here is a palm-sized portable device that permits HDTV to be viewed on a Mac.

One of the first gotchas I discovered right off the bat, is that the USB connection must be tied to a USB 2.0 port and not through a powered USB 1.1 Hub. (Well, now I know what kind of

USB hub I am using!)

Can we get HDTV by going retro and back to antenna input instead of being connected to cable? Can we get ATSC?  This chart is what I

was able to discover by going to http://www.checkhd.com and looking locally.

 The EyeTV app scanned through 86 channels

before settling on the ones shown here. Each of these  has an equivalent High Definition channel.

The TVMini HD comes with EyeTV and a portable antenna and has an internal ATSC/Clear QAM decoder that also supports 1920x1080 (1080i) digital video-streaming for the Mac.

ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee http://www.atsc.org/) allows for airwave reception while Clear QAM permits unencrypted satellite or cable signals.

Discover more about ATSC here; http://www.hdtvprimer.com/ISSUES/what_is_ATSC.html and here; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC.

My experience with the antenna and the 5 channels to work with showed the feed would “fade” in and go out instead of staying strong and streaming. If I had put the antenna on the roof  or used a stronger antenna, this behavior would change.  I’m sure that was caused by radio interference, so I switched over to the cable to see if it was any better. Instead of scanning 86 channels, it began scanning through 812 of them. It came up with 4 channels of which 3 had signals, but these were digital TV and not High Def. So if I want to use this device, I can switch between the antenna and the cable, but my picks are not that great either way – at least for today. I understand more systems will be coming online to HDTV later this year.

The infrared remote is essentially is a EyeTV Infrared Remote Control from Elgato Systems that controls this Personal Video Recorder (PVR) just like a TV/VCR Remote.

I personally found the onscreen controller to be more responsive than the infrared remote.

Besides the excellent 63-page Elgato System EyeTV Software manual there is a like to where folks have discovered other ways to make the app work for them at;

http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=support_tips

What with the US government mandate to move to HDTV in 2006 and I understand that has been pushed out now, there are not a whole lot of choices to choose from as far as regarding channels and content.

The Elgato EyeTV 2.0 system looks a little smoother than the Elgato EyeTV system we reviewed earlier with the ConvertX PVR (Version 1.8.4 update).

At this point the optimal system would be one that plays both analog and digital. The ConvertX is optimized for analog and the Miglia TVMini HD is optimized for use with High Definition channels.  Elgato made the software versions system-specific so they are not interchangeable between hardware platforms even though the menu gives the options. The Activation Keys are such that one does not work with the other.

I like the look of the Miglia TVMini HD. I like the fact that the antenna unit has lots of cable. I wished the Elgato Remote responded better.  And I wished the TVMini HD also handled analog, because it looks like we are going to be seeing a lot of it for the foreseeable future evidenced by the number of HD channels currently available (as in - not many).

If you are a gadget geek, get this.

To get the picture on HDTV, here are some more links for digging deeper:

http://www.hdtvinfoport.com/

http://www.hdtvpub.com/

http://www.hdtvmagazine.com/index.php

http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/CE/kuhn/hdtv/95x5.htm

http://www.cnet.com/4520-7874_1-5102926-1.html

http://www.nab.org/