Customer Reviews

equinux TubeStick Hybrid ATSC

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I've had this for several weeks and it's a disaster. main problem is that with the included antenna it receives no stations at all even though the map says that all kinds of other people around me are getting reception. company suggested I get a terk antenna. well, the coaxial doesn't fit. can't find a pal connection. why in the hell doesn't it have a plug in like similar units so the antenna can be hooked up. I'm really ticked at this mickey mouse. so far I don't have a clue if it works or not.

I actually purchased my Tubestick Hybrid from Equinux on a special promotion they had for the Olympics for $60 ($75 with Tax & Shipping). I have Comcast HD digital cable and wanted to be able to record programs on a new Mac Mini connected to my Sony Bravia LCD TV. Several years ago I had an analog EyeTv's 250 tuner and really liked it. The price seemed to be great (less than half of most competing products). So, enough back story, let's get to the review.

First, the software. It's a mess. You can't see a list of channels if you are in full screen mode (no pop up list for changing channels). I have been completely unable to get the electronic programming guide (EPG, it's used to tell you what you are watching, the TV schedule of upcoming programs and to program the software to record a future show) to work--I'm a hardcore geek, so this isn't a problem with the end user. It uses some obscure source called TubeGuideUS (as far as I can tell they don't even have a website) that charges $20 a year after the first year. You would need to have a website, so you could program your computer to record a show when you are away from home (EyeTV uses TitanTV to do this for free). Then there is a registration process... Equinux requires you to login to their server and tell them who you are to be able to even use the software (mandatory registration), which is a bit of a privacy issue, but also means that if there is some problem they can decided that you aren't authorized to use the software. I have had to install and reinstall the software to try and get it to work, and now I am getting some window popping up about registration or buying another license--I have ever only used this one one computer. If all of this wasn't bad enough, the software crashes regularly (at least every 24 hours), so setting it up to record, even if you could get the EPG to work, probably wouldn't work.

Then there's the hardware. I know there are a number of encrypted channels on digital cable, but all of the digital channels it does get are garbled and break up continuously. These are digital channels that my TV can tune just fine directly through the cable (not through the cable box), so it's not that these channels are weak or encrypted. What's interesting is that the tuner can tune, without problem, the analog channels, which takes much more processor power to encode than do the digital channels, so the computer isn't the problem either. This also brings up another problem. You can only see and use either the digital channels OR the analog channels (you have to select which source in The Tube software), so if you want to be able to use the digital HD channels where available and the analog channels when the digital channel is encrypted, you have to actually switch the source in the program.

Finally, we come to customer support. I actually contacted them (they have extremely weird hours since they are in Germany) with these issues. After a day or so, I got a reply with an updated build of the software. It made it so the tuner didn't see any digital channels--guess that means they weren't breaking up anymore but didn't really solve the problem. I then emailed them back with a complete description of what I have found (that was a week ago) and haven't heard anything since. I was going to send it back, but they charge a 20% restocking fee if you have opened up the box and I would have to pay for the shipping to get it back to them. At this point it probably just isn't worth it, so I will likely eat this loss.

So in summary, I agree with one of the previous reviewers who described it as an "Unmitigated Disaster of a product". The software lack basic functionality and is unstable enough that it should never have gotten out of beta. They hardware clearly has a problem with digital signals and the company's licensing system and support are awful. Look at EyeTV or look at Tivo, but no matter what the TubeStick costs, just don't do it.

I own a lot of Equinux products. I shouldn't - every time I have to license one I have to go through their Gestapo licensing procedures again and it always puts me in an ultra-cranky mood. Nonetheless, I bought Coverscout, iSale, MediaCentral and now, this... thing.

FIRST UP: No EPG. Whatsoever. Supposedly you can parse XMLTV, but that involves Fink and terminal commands. No thanks. I'm not near that brave and I've recompiled Linux RAID arrays.

NEXT UP: No hardware acceleration. None. I've had this thing for a month now and have used it on a Mac Mini, a 2.0GHz Macbook and a 4GB, dual watercooled 2.5GHz G5 with the phatty phatty $800 video card. It flakes, it crumbles, it dies on all of them. In talking with Equinux, they really think you should have a 7200RPM hard drive (I do), dedicated VRAM (I do on the G5... but that means that you're not running it on a Mini, you're not running it on a Macbook). Not only that, but by far the worst performance was on the G5, which has 256MB of video memory.

ALSO: Buggy as hell. Crashes like a freight train. All the time. Doing things like, oh, looking for program guides. Or updating (it's constantly updating - I swear they push a new, buggier release every second day). Or switching from one channel to another.

AND: Takes 5-10 seconds to change channels. And if you want to switch from NTSC to ATSC, god help you. *IF* it does it (through a menu command - think you're gonna use this thing with a remote? Think again) it'll take 10-30 seconds. It's more likely to crash.

Wanna number your channels so that they reflect reality, rather than the QAM bands that it finds from the cable company? Okay, you can do that. By hand. Fortunately you only have to do it once, right? Well, unless you delete a channel you don't have (encrypted channels show up, but you can't do anything with them - not something I have a problem with, but one reason you might be deleting channels). If you accidentally delete a channel, you get to rescan the whole band. And relabel the whole band. Are we having fun yet?

I haven't tried the Elgato products. That's next. I've been a fan of Equinux's philosophy in the past, their heinous licensing procedures notwithstanding. This thing is a clusterf*ck of a product. I'd rather use rabbit ears on a black'n'white Westinghouse console television than continue with this tidy little chunk of dung.

SHOULD YOU WANT TO USE ONE: You might be okay with a 3.0GHz iMac. Or a Mac Pro. I was thinking of buying an iMac to use as a secondary monitor (this thing plugs into a 4000 lumen projector) until I realized how insane that was. Seriously. You'll need $2000 worth of computer to make this thing work. If your computer is older than six months, is a Macbook, a Macbook Air, or a Mac Mini, forget it. Go buy an Elgato instead.

Bought the equinux TubeStick. Unpacked it, spent severa hours trying to get reception- got one out of 12 stations in the city of Minneapolis after multiple attempts, antennas and locations within my home. Cool idea- Bad product- Bad software and bad company. They nailed me 20% to return something that was misrepresented. AVOID THIS PRODUCT and COMPANY!!!

I was excited to get Tube Stick Hybrid. Being able to capture ATSC content on my MacBook was a dream come true. Their site even had a picture of the exact MacBook, so I assumed my Mac has enough horse power for the task.

Well, the software kept crashing. Then came an update. The software still kept crashing. Clearing preferences and any other residuals and reinstalling the software doesn't seem to help either. ... oh then an another update came along. Still keeps crashing.

Finally I was fed up. I sent an email to equinux with a crash log. Their response was something along the line of "thank you for submitting your issue. this issue has been escalated and our engineering team will take a look". That was the last I heard from them and it's been 2 months.

Screw Equinux. I decided to build a HTPC. I hooked up TubeStick USB tuner to the Windows box and installed Beyond TV (which by the way is an amazing DVR solution). Works like a champ!

By the way, when I got TubeStick Hybrid, I also got a copy of MediaCentral (equinux's version of Front Row). Guess what? POS! It crashes all the time and sometimes even causes a kernel panic on my MacBook.

Dear Equinux,
Thanks for trying to bring a DVR solution to Mac, but try with a proper QA resource next time. ;-)

This device only works with included "The Tube" software. The Tube stores recordings in a proprietary format. There is an export function that allows users to save the recordings in other formats, e.g. AppleTV or iMovie formats. Without this export function recordings can be viewed only with The Tube software, not with Quicktime player, or anything else.

I have an AppleTV, so I want to watch recordings on that. The Tube's export function at first had a bug that corrupted recordings over an hour in length. After a recent update to The Tube, exports fail with an error message. I've been in contact with Equinux support off and on (they lost my case for awhile) for over 6 months and they have still not been able to resolve this issue.

I have a friend who purchased an Elgato product. He says it works great and the software has no bugs. While the price is higher, I would have bought that instead of the Equinux Tubestick if I had known the Equinux product basically does not allow making recordings that can be played on the AppleTV (or any other software besides the Equinux product, for that matter).

I purchased my Tubestick around a year ago, Its never the same expierence twice, if I run the channel search 3 times I will get 3 different results on which channels it can receive. I finally ended up scanning 5 times each time takes 5 or so minutes and creating local channel guides then going in and editing them together so I can have a complete list of channels available in Minneapolis. if I record a show, and then export is insanely slow, then you are stuck with raster which you can't remove. I contacted the company and they were fairly responsive with a yes, we know about that problem but we aren't doing anything about it. This has bean one huge disappointment.

The Tubestick made our system so unstable as to be completely unusable, and customer service for Equinux never responded to questions.

The software is terrible on this, I was running it on a new Mac Mini and it crashed constantly, tying up the whole machine!

On top of that, the 20% restocking fee the company charges is ridiculous! I mean, if it was a good product I would understand, but this is junk. Buy a Tivo!

I purchased this product in good faith. It has never functioned in the least.When I contacted customer service and related my problem. They acted like I was unable to follow clearly indicated instructions. I would never buy this product again and never expect to see my money back.