anyone have an eyetv 200? review?

[pants]

http://www.elgato.com/products/eyetv200.html

how's the mpeg2 encoding? just curious as to pepoples thoughts on it.

thanks

[whitesoxx]

Well after a looooong wait my EyeTV 200 arrived from the Apple store this week. It looks pretty cool and is very easy to set up. The first thing I noticed, though, is that the live TV picture is a bit shaky. The MPEG2 compression seems to be too slow for a good live feed.

This becomes more apparent when you record from VHS (the main reason I got it)- very often the picture just freezes, is out of synch with the sound or it sounds like you are playing a VHS tape that is about to get stuck in the VCR. So I panicked and stopped the recording, only to find out that this was not effecting the final recording.

Then I found out annoyingly after a LOT of trial and error that if you record from a non-tv source, the recording time is automatically set at one hour. You can change this manually, but this isn't in the manual (which could be improved as well) and I had no clue why my 90 minute movie could not be recorded.

The MPEG2 encoding is very good, by the way, better than I have seen on many stand alone dvd recorders. What is great is that it captures PAL and NTSC (I live in a PAL country), so I can digitize all my NTSC videotapes.

That's the good part... Unfortunately the diadvantages outweigh everything else. The program continuously crashes, it doesnt recognize the videosignal very often and you have to reset the unit countless times for it to work. Worst of all, when you save the file you have recorded as an MPEG2 movie, it doesn't save the entire file 1 out of 3 times. I recorded a 1 hour 45 min movie (after figuring out how to record more than one hour!), then saved it as an MPEG movie and deleted the EyeTV file to save hard disk space. The file EyeTV saved was 55 minutes long!!!
This happens A LOT with files you save for no apparent reason, so you ALWAYS have to check the end result is good. One 40 minute file I had to save 6 times (!!!) before I could finally end up with a 40 minute movie and not one of 11 minutes.

In short, it works -sometimes! It is in need of major firmware and software updates (one other annoying thing is you can't pause a recording). I am returning my one because I am extremely disappointed. Not user friendly at all and the errors it generates outshine the good results when it does work. And forget about watching live TV on your mac, it's like watching a quicktime file on a 56k connection sometimes.

Too bad, really, because it sounded too good to be true: no more annoying encoding from DV to mpeg etc. Elgato had better rethink releasing product that is not quite market-ready!

[Frobozz]

I don't have one of these, but here are some more user reviews:
http://xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/eye_tv_review.html#updates

[Jparker]

I have an EyeTV, but not the 200. Mine is the one that encodes to MPEG-1. I haven't had any problems with mine. It works very well. I have noticed the jumping you were talking about when I was trying to record a VHS tape that was poor quality. The device has to get a proper high-gain signal to register properly. Maybe a signal booster in line would help. The manual definitely could have been better but once you figure it all out it is a breeze to use.

[mhar4]

No-one seems to be having too much luck with this device. That's really too bad, as it seems like a great potential competitor to the ADS Instant DVD. Maybe they'll sort out the bugs in time.

[mdfrancois]

Maybe i've just been lucky, but mine has been working just fine. I've been getting good recordings to disk (i'm using a firewire 7200 rpm lacie 2D 200gb), and i've converted TV shows to VCD and DVD using Toast 6. The image quality is great, and everyting has stayed in sync.

I bought the quicktime MPEG2 extension, so that I can use that to edit, but the thought of exporting to huge DV files so that I can edit in iMovie is a bit of a bummer. I was hoping to use this to edit old home movies, but it hasn't turned out to be as easy as I thought, since the MPEG2 format it uses can't be opened in iMovie.

Does anyone know if Final Cut Express would accept these files?

mdfrancois