Just got an EyeTV 250 Plus for my iMac - Other World Computing has refurbs at $110. Since it has an uncompressed "game mode" (meant to eliminate signal delay so you can connect a console gaming system to your Mac) I made the assumption that it would capture uncompressed. I was right. Just enable game mode and no hardware encoding will be applied to captures.

And I just won a Panasonic AG-1970 in excellent condition on ebay.

I wanted to do an immediate test on the EyeTV but don't have cable wired up to the room with the iMac yet. So I decided to try a capture from the AG-1970. I don't have many tapes any more but I dug up a VHS copy of Basquiat. I assumed it wasn't going to look too good without a lot of fiddling with the VCR and capture software but I was pleasantly surprised.

Turned the noise filter on the AG-1970 off and the TBC on. Didn't do anything else other than insert tape and press play. I used the EyeTV 3 software to capture and turned the brightness up a bit. I did a 46 minute uncompressed capture at 640x480 through S-video before hitting a problem with the tape. File size was approx 1.5 GB. Did an MPEG-4 export with default settings which cut the size in half. Then I used MPEG Streamclip to chop out a clip.

Brightness in playback is slightly different between Quicktime and VLC and the picture was much darker when editing in MPEG Streamclip. Looks best in Quicktime. Also VLC shows a brief shot of the previous scene which does not appear elsewhere.

Anyway, I thought it looked pretty good for a first try with next to no effort. Here's the clip with Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, and Dennis Hopper.