A couple months ago I ordered the Elgato EyeTV 250 Plus from the online Apple Store (free shipping FTW). Technically speaking its a TV tuner, but I bought it for its cassette digitizing abilities - more on that later. I thought that was the only use I’d get out of it too, since Elgato doesn’t offer a Electronic Program Guide (EPG/listings) for Canada. Until now. The past few weeks they’ve been rolling out a beta version of the EyeTV 3 software that includes support for a Canadian EPG.
Tag Archive for 'media center'
I’ve long dreamed of setting up a Mac based media center. So during the past few days I’ve been testing out some solutions to this little problem. There are the obvious ones, like the AppleTV, and then some more complicated mixtures of hardware and applications.
My goal is to sync or stream all of my digital media (music, TV shows, movies, pictures etc) to a large SDTV (standard definition television) in the family room.
1) AppleTV
The AppleTV is an amazing little box. It’ll sync or stream nearly all of your media from any computer that can run iTunes. There’s also some nifty plugins to extend its functionality. On paper it looks perfect, but in practice it caries a number of limitations.
- Initial cost
- File type limitations (think DIVX etc)
- Limited configurability/tweaking
- No support for SDTVs
These limitations are somewhat superficial, I could solve most of them by hacking and having a bigger wallet. At this time, however, the AppleTV just isn’t a viable option.
Recent Comments