Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
24 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Unmitigated Disaster of a product, June 10, 2008
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.
|
|
|
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
ticked off, August 2, 2009
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.
|
|
|
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Solid Hardware. Poor Software., January 26, 2009
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. ;-)
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
