After finding no real reviews on the Elgato EyeTV 500, an HDTV DVR, I thought that I would write up my own review of this excellent product.

Find my review below…

If you are already considering this product, I need not go into any great detail to describe what this product is used for. When I was looking for a review, the only real review I found was this review on slashdot. This may be because I didn’t know where to look, but I didn’t find much else that called itself a review. On to the review…

I don’t have cable or satellite TV so I figured that I could try out the product and see what kind of stations I could receive. I went to AntennaWeb and found all the digital stations that I could receive which ended up being like 6 or so. This is more than I was getting just regularly, so what the heck. Anyhow, after hooking up the receiver to a cheapo antenna I picked up 15 digital channels. Note this is channels, not stations. It seems that some stations broadcast a number of digital channels, some of them are HDTV (usually only one) while the others are SDTV — a lower quality picture, much like a DVD.

If you want hardware specs, go to Elgato’s website. The slashdot review said that anybody who didn’t have a G5 processor wouldn’t be able to watch live HDTV, so I was worried that my G4 Powerbook wouldn’t be able to handle a live window. I was pleased that my 12″ PB was able to play fullscreen HDTV without any problems at all. True, my display is only 1024×768, but an HDTV stream looks great on it. I snagged my parents’ 17″ PB and have been watching fullscreen HDTV on it this weekend. The widescreen on the 17″ is a 16:10 ratio, while HDTV is 16:9, so it isn’t quite full screen, but close.

If you use linux or other operating systems, fear not. If you can use vlc, you too can stream from the Mac to another computer running linux. Just start recording something, jump to the archive directory, open the .mpg file as a stream and start it up. You can figure it out.

Now for the pictures of it in action.

Not sure what else to put, so if you have questions, post them.

Update
Laptop Specs: The 12″ PB has 1.25 GB RAM, while the 17″ has 512 MB.