I recently took advantage of an Apple special offer and picked up a Miglia TVMini for my aging Powerbook, as a possible precursor to a full-on digital media centre setup. I’ve seen PVRs working, and last week I set up a Freeview box for the first time and was impressed by the service, so I was keen to see what can be done with a computer in the equation.
So far I’m quite pleased. The device itself is small, with a similar design and form factor to an iPod Shuffle. How things have changed since the bulky PCI card from ATI that I installed in my first PC! Installation is as easy as dragging the EyeTV application from the CD into my Applications folder and going through some basic steps the first time I ran it.
Unfortunately in the area I live, the supplied aerial was not sufficient, but plugging it into the regular aerial worked fine. Of course, this only gives you terrestrial or digital terrestrial channels – but to hook up to satellite / cable TV requires a rather more expensive box, and only really gets me a couple of extra channels.
Picture quality is good, and the software can automatically swap aspect ratios depending on the broadcast programme, which is an improvement on my existing TV. It’s possible to watch at a range of sizes, including a NADD-fueling mini version that means you can surf and read email and watch TV simultaneously.
The most obvious immediate and cool feature of the TVMini is being able to pause live TV. This works extremely well, and is totally flawless – once you get over the mental barrier of thinking “I shouldn’t be able to do that”.
The remote supplied with the TVMini works well, even when there’s no direct line-of-sight between the two devices. I doubt I’ll be using the remote much, though – it’s a bit big and bulky, and I’m usually close enough to the laptop keyboard anyhow.
The EyeTV software includes an integrated tv guide from tvtv, and a free one year subscription which allows you to set up recording remotely via their website (the desktop app checks at a pre-configured frequency, and automatically downloads new recording requests). The tv guide seemed to be missing a few channels, but had most of the important ones. Further subscriptions appear to cost £14.90 per year, which isn’t unreasonable.
Recording seems to be reasonably light on the CPU, and I’ve been able to record to an external USB hard drive with no problems (even whilst reading and writing large files to the disk simultaneously). The only downside is that there’s not much compression on the output files – an hour of TV is approximately 1.5GB.
Since the files are simple MPEGs, it’s possible to watch recorded shows and record new shows simultaneously. Interestingly, the files are stored as MacOS packages, with the actual .mpg bundled with a bunch of eyeTV-specific metadata. It shouldn’t be too difficult to re-compress the files if I run out of disk space.
There’s still a few features I haven’t explored, but I’d certainly recommend this to anyone wanting to try out TV on the desktop. Now I just need to save up the money for a 30 inch LCD screen…
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