Buy Eyetv 250 PlusEyetv 250 Plus Product Description:
- The EyeTV 250 Plus is a hybrid TV tuner for the Mac with a powerful hardware encoder for higher quality recordings
- EyeTV 250 Plus receives both digital TV (DTT, or Freeview) as well as analog TV
- Offers a complete solution for converting videos from VHS tape to DVD-Video.
Product Description
Digital TV Recorder for the Mac. Combines TV recording software with a digital and analog TV receiver and hardware encoder.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Who needs a TV any more?
By Richard Drdul
The EyeTV 250 Plus is a great little gizmo. It basically turns your Mac into a Tivo, with the ability to record as many TV shows as you can fit on your hard drive(s). The editing feature is easy to use -- it takes only a couple of minutes to remove all the commercials from a one-hour TV show.Even though it comes with a remote control, I use the computer interface exclusively, as it is faster and provides access to every feature (also, I noticed that the IR input on the EyeTV box was picking up signals from other remotes, so I ended up covering it with a small piece of tape).Recorded shows can be exported in a variety of formats, or can be left in their native MPEG-2 format for burning to DVD without any intermediate transcoding. The EyeTV comes with Toast Basic, which I have found to be good enough for my needs. With Toast, I can burn multiple recordings to a single DVD, with a main menu similar to what you get on a commercial DVD.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.Easy set up. Was archiving old Hi 8 tapes within minutes.
By Joey Sather
I wanted something that would alow me to both watch basic cable television on my computer and archive old hi-8 tapes. Elgato makes this very easy to do with the eyetv 250. I was able to record the entire tape with the included software and then select clips of that recording to export into different formats. While I was recording a new tape onto the computer I was able to export a previous recording into different file formats. This allowed the entire process of archiving our hi-8 tapes go much quicker.The program guide is also a huge improvement from what I was using with my PC. I had been using an Adaptec product for the PC that did the same thing but was not nearly as user friendly. The eyetv 250 is much easier to use and like everything I have added to my new iMac it just works.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.Works as advertised, great product, verify version being shipped though
By E. Gehr
I bought this item for use on a Mac Mini with 1.83 C2D processor, 2GB RAM, 80GB HD and running Mac OSX Leopard. If you plan on using this product to archive movies and TV shows, make sure you have plenty of hard drive space. At DVD quality, a 30 minute TV show takes over 1GB of storage. This is not the highest quality recording method available to you in EyeTV, there is one level higher. You can lower the quality to create smaller files however.The recording process has minimal impact on processor usage on my relatively slow Mini. If you plan on exporting the movies to MP4 format for AppleTV or an iPod it would be wise to also purchase Elgato's Turbo.264 to accelerate the processing and to relieve your computer CPU of the task. The Turbo.264 is basically a coprocessor that plugs into a USB port. As I mentioned above recording and storage to MPG2 really has no significant impact on the processor as the MPG encoding is done on the EyeTV hardware. The optional MP4 conversion for use with AppleTV and iPod video takes a great deal of processor time and resources. With the Turbo.264 installed I don't really notice that I am converting to MP4. The EyeTV software automatically sees and makes use of the Turbo.264 so it's transparent to the user.At the time I ordered it there where still older versions of this product in the pipeline. The latest version of the hardware has an option to view broadcast HD TV, so if you are going to need that feature make sure the latest version ships from the supplier. I received last years version. Not a big deal to me as far as the hardware goes, but I did want the latest version of the EyeTV software, which is version 3. What I received is version 2. For recent purchasers of EyeTV you can download the update for free, but you have to send Elgato a scanned copy of your receipt (via their web site) to get access to it or possess a special upgrade coupon (supposed to be supplied with the hardware). Mine was old enough to not have the coupon, but the web site process was easy and quick. I had the latest version in less then 4 hours from the time I made the request on the ElGato website. I also discovered that the package I got did not include Toast Basic. I shot an email to Elgato and had Toast Basic installed a couple of hours later. Very good support as far as I can see so far.The product works as advertised, is easy to install and use. Channel changing is fast, image quality very good,The Eye TV software is very intuitive, easy to use and fast. On thing I have had happen on more then one occasion is a failure to record a scheduled show. Most of the time everything is fine, but once in a while I see an error message and a show that does not record. Could be because I am using an external Firewire drive to store the movies (MyBook 500GB). The drive goes to sleep after 10 minutes of idle time, so it could just be a timeout as the software waits for the drive to wake up. I should add that my Mac is on 24/7. I have gotten in the habit of shutting down the EyeTV software when I am not using it and noted that the problem goes away. EyeTV automatically starts launches when a recording is scheduled and when it does it accesses the drive where I am storing the movies, and wakes the drive before the recording starts.Aside from that it works perfectly and I feel it was money well spent.
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