Elgato EyeTV 250 Plus Digital/Analog TV Receiver and Video Converter

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Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 2.5 x 7.8 inches ; 3.2 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0013PQ6P4
• Item model number: 10020780
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
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  Electronics > Accessories & Supplies > Audio & Video Accessories > TV Accessories > HDTV Accessories > HDTV Receivers & Tuners

• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 9, 2008

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

The Most Powerful TV Tuner for your Mac Watch, record, edit and enjoy TV on the Mac with EyeTV 250 Plus, a hybrid Mac TV tuner with a powerful hardware encoder for higher quality recordings and smaller video files. EyeTV 250 Plus receives free-to-air digital TV, analog cable, and unencrypted digital cable. In addition, with its composite and S-Video inputs and powerful MPEG encoding hardware, the EyeTV 250 Plus is a complete, high quality solution for transferring your old analog tapes into the Mac.
Highlights Powerful TV tuner and video converter Receives digital TV with an antenna, basic analog cable TV, and unencrypted digital cable (Clear QAM) Built-in MPEG compression hardware, making it the best choice for older, non-Intel Macs State-of-the-art chip technology for world-class TV tuner performance Includes award-winning EyeTV 3 software
	watch Watch, pause, and rewind live television on your Mac at your desk or from the comfort of your couch. Sit at your desk and navigate the resizable window with a mouse, or go full screen and stretch out on the couch with the included remote control. EyeTV’s gorgeous on-screen menus makes it easy to channel surf and move through the Program Guide and menus in the comfort of your living room.
record EyeTV features a comprehensive built-in program guide, with detailed listings provided by TV Guide*. You can easily record any show with one click. Even set up automatic schedules record your favorite series, or create Smart Schedules to record just the shows you like. *includes one year of free service with optional renewal for only US $19.95 per year.
	edit Use EyeTV’s built-in Editor to remove unwanted content from your recording, or to crop the beginning and end of the show. The Editor also enables you to create one or more short clips from a longer recording and save the clips individually as new EyeTV recordings.
enjoy With one click you can add your recordings to your iTunes library for syncing with your iPhone, iPod or Apple TV. Take your recordings wherever you go. Watch your recordings on your big-screen television with an Apple TV. Build up your iTunes library with all your favorites. EyeTV can even handle the exporting automatically when recordings finish, so it doesn't take any clicks at all.
EyeTV on your iPhone The EyeTV 250 Plus also works with the new EyeTV app for the iPhone (optional; available at the iTunes App Store). With the EyeTV app, you can watch live TV wherever you have a WiFi connection; around the corner at the coffee shop or around the world.
System Requirements Macintosh® computer with a PowerPC® G4,G5 or Intel Core® processor** 512 MB of physical RAM a built-in USB 2.0 port Mac OS X v10.4.11 or later Internet connection required to download Program Guide data **720p or 1080i HD features require an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Technical Specifications Analog/ATSC-Tuner Frequency Range: 48-862 MHz (VHF and UHF) Analog TV Standards: NTSC Digital TV Standards: ATSC, Clear QAM Input and Output USB 2.0 Antenna input: Standard F connector S-Video (via break out cable, included) Composite video (via break out cable, included) Stereo audio (via break out cable, included) IR remote control sensor Video Encoding High-quality real-time encoding Supports MPEG-2 and MPEG-1 NTSC resolutions: up to 720x480, 30 fps PAL resolutions: up to 720x576, 25 fps SECAM resolutions: up to 720x576, 25 fps Variable and constant bit rate up to 15-Mbit/sec Audio Encoding MPEG 1 Layer II Sampling rates of 32 kHz, 44.1 kHz, and 48 kHz Compressed bit rates up to 448 kbit/sec

Product Description

EyeTV 250 Plus is a TV tuner and a powerful video converter in one device. Watch and pause live TV on your Mac. Record, subscribe to TV series, and create Smart Playlists. Edit out unwanted content and send your favorites to iTunes to sync automatically. Enjoy sharing EyeTV recordings over a local network with other Macs and accessing them on an iPod or iPhone via Wi-Fi. Store your collection on your Mac or external disc, or burn to DVD-Video using Roxio Toast Basic (included). EyeTV 250 Plus receives free over-the-air (OTA) HDTV, Clear QAM, and traditional analog TV, and comes with a composite video and S-Video break-out cable to connect a set-top box. EyeTV 250 Plus captures high quality video from analog sources such as a VCR or camcorder, comes with a VHS Assistant and iPod Assistant to guide you through the setup. EyeTV 250 Plus' built-in hardware encoder rapidly converts analog video to high quality digital video without using your Mac's processor.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great tuner for Macs! This is the new model!, May 25, 2008

By	Brian Wallace (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The EyeTV 250 Plus is an external USB based tuner that supports NTSC (Analog Cable and Satellite), ATSC (Digital Satellite) and QAM (Digital Cable). (Not all the models available for sale on Amazon are the newer one that added QAM support, so be careful This one definitely has the QAM support). It also has an adapter that can accept Composite and S-Video inputs along with analog stereo audio. For my purposes I was most interested in the QAM capability since I am a cable subscriber. The biggest difference between the cheaper EyeTV Hybrid and the EyeTV 250 Plus is that the 250 has an external MPEG-2 (Video)/MPEG-1 (Audio) encoder (The Hybrid model relies on your CPU to convert the signal into digital format). The advantage here is that when you're recording or viewing something off of either analog TV or the analog inputs all the encoding happens outside of your computer, so all the computer has to do is decode and display the video. This takes a lot of load off your CPU so it becomes much easier to multi-task.

The tuner itself is great. The biggest plus (in my case) is the ability to pick up Clear QAM digital HD channels. This confines you to only the broadcast channels (ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, and PBS in my case). It does take quite a bit of CPU power to handle HD broadcasts however.

More important than the tuner is the included EyeTV 3 Software, which controls the tuner. EyeTV 3 is pretty slick. It includes a TitanTV subscription so you can access TV listings and even remotely schedule a recording to your Mac. The program also allows you set up favorite channels. It also keeps the list of all the channels you have access to, which is my case is 461. Keep in mind - that's an analog and digital version of every basic channel, plus the five HD channels I can see plus all the other HD channels that I can detect but can't watch (it just says encrypted). The only other channels that show up are any non-encrypted digital channels such as the local school districts TV stations and On-demand channels.

What I like best about EyeTV 3 (and I'm using 3.0.2) is that it offers a plethora of deinterlacing options. My number one annoyance is interlaced content. The beauty of EyeTV is that it does a great job deinterlacing content, which makes SD material look a whole lot better and removes some of the annoying jaggies in HD material. While it has the standard motion-adaptive and always settings for deinterlacing, it also offers a progressive scan setting which doubles the frame rate from 30 frames per second to 60 frames per second. The results is especially noticeable when watching SD material. I have to watch Versus via the s-video inputs on the EyeTV and I can hardly believe the huge difference that the progressive scan setting makes for watching hockey. It doesn't make it look anywhere close to HD - but it makes it look a whole lot better. It's a bigger strain to use the progressive scan setting on HD content and it makes even more Core 2 Duo powered mini sweat (although I think this may have more to do with the poor on-board graphics) but with HD I don't find progressive scan to be as big of a plus.

The other great thing about EyeTV is that it functions as a super-DVR. You can set up series recordings just like you can with a normal DVR and EyeTV records the program and saves it to your hard drive. You can then use the built-in editor to remove commercials, etc. While the editor isn't iMovie, it's pretty good and the preview panes down on the bottom can help you find the commercials quickly. What makes EyeTV superior to a regular DVR is that you can keep your recordings around as long as you have disk space and you can edit them. You can automatically have recordings exported to other formats - even directly for your iPod or Apple TV. Many people have asked about a recording feature for the Apple TV, and the EyeTV is the closest thing to it. You can set up a recording, and then tell it to export to Apple TV and add to iTunes. Once the show is finished it'll do the exporting and it'll be available on the Apple TV.

So what isn't it good at? Well, I find the exporting feature the most frustrating. It captures everything in MPEG-2 video and either AC3 Audio or MPEG-1 Audio. My frustration is that the exporting feature is extremely slow. When I do a recording sometimes I'll get about 3 seconds of data on the beginning of the recording that I don't want there. Editing it out is easy enough, but then EyeTV insists on compacting the whole recording again. Also, even though EyeTV can capture and play AC3 (Dolby Digital) tracks, it can't output them to QuickTime files. It's AppleTV setting also lacks support for 24 frames per second so everything (even if its HD) is dropped to 960*540 if it has a frame rate of 30 fps. (The good news is that the solution to this program is free! - HandBrake) I also find the lack of dual tuners annoying. Although EyeTV 3 has a Picture-In-Picture function it can't be used unless you have two devices because the EyeTV 250 Plus is a single tuner only. This also means that if you're recording a program you also have to watch whatever you're recording. So if there are two programs on at the same time that you want to record you're out of luck. My final complaint is a pipe dream, but it would be really nice if the EyeTV 250 could accept component and digital inputs for the recording of HD material with digital audio.

All in all I am extremely satisfied with the EyeTV 250 Plus, despite the few shortcomings. It provides a great TV-on-you-Mac solution at a relatively low cost.

31 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Extremely limited digital cable support, July 3, 2008

By	Mr Kitty "mr kitty" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

I have to admit to not fully understanding how the EyeTV worked before purchasing it, but I desperately wanted to pipe my cable through my (Intel) Mac mini "media center" and the reviews of this product are great everywhere, so I took a chance.

Boy am I glad Amazon has such a great returns policy.

Anyone looking to use an EyeTV for digital cable needs to read this article from Elgato first:

http://support.elgato.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=8

Basically it says that the only digital cable channels you are going to get with their devices are the (limited) ones your cable company pushes unencrypted. Mostly, those will be the free network channels in your area. In fact, if your tv has a digital tuner in it already, you will only get the channels that already come through to that tv if you bypass your cable box.

You can theoretically put the cable box in between and use it to select the channels, but when I did this the picture quality was so degraded it was hardly worth it. What channels it did get (without the cable box) worked great, but those are mostly analog cable and not HD (your area may vary).

From what I read online (trying to get it to work) I understand that this isn't really Elgato's fault -- content providers and cable companies have locked them out of providing full "cable box" service -- but the analog cable selection is definitely on the decline, so I can't see the wisdom in investing in this platform.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's (almost) perfect!, October 6, 2008

By	Videonaut (Washington DC USA) - See all my reviews

It was a breeze to hook up and get running on my Mac: plug in the device, let the setup run to scan for channels, define the recording directory, etc. The software is mostly trouble-free, but has a few minor glitches that I've gotten used to.

One is a one-time annoyance: linking the channels to the TitanTV program guide. It's a little more tedious than it needs to be. The second problem is an ongoing thing: occasionally, when it wakes up to record a program it doesn't seem to "see" the signal from the antenna and i get a blank recording instead of a show. If you're "catch-up" watching (watching a show while you're recording it) it will yank you out of your show and into live tv when the recording finishes, and you have to go back and find your place to continue watching the recording. Finally, it seems to eat up more CPU time than it should, even while it's not (apparently) doing anything. However, El Gato seems to be very committed to software maintenance and enhancement, and the EyeTV software has improved even in the short time i've owned it!

All in all, though, it's easy to use, convenient and a great alternative to those all-in-one DVR boxes, since you have so much control over scheduling, editing and exporting for later iPod viewing.