EyeTV Update Sends WiFi TV To iPhone And iPod.

I think I know why Apple doesn’t include a digital video recorder in AppleTV. Such a feature would antagonize content providers who don’t like such devices.

Elgato, maker of the best digital video recorder for the Mac, doesn’t care and their new EyeTV software only makes life better for Mac users who want to record TV.

Let’s face it. TiVo is very good and people love recording TV shows and movies and playing them back, skipping through the commercials with thumb and glee. Apple, for now, can’t go there for fear of irritating the very people who make content available on iTunes Store.

Cable companies throughout the US provide subscribers with their own digital video recorders which function, more or less, just like TiVo. Scheduled recording and time shifting video content is here to stay, so advertisers need to come up with a better way to entice our eyeballs.

Elgato’s EyeTV is a combination of hardware and software. The hardware captures the video from the air or cable and records it to your Mac. EyeTV’s software is the control and viewing software on your Mac and it’s very good and getting better.

The latest version of EyeTV actually streams wireless video from the Elgato software to your iPod touch or iPhone for viewing. While it’s a nifty feature, it’s of dubious value. After all, you and your Mac have to be within so many feet of the wireless signal to be picked up via WiFi on your iPod touch (not the new iPod classic or iPod nano) or iPhone.

But not to worry. It’s not a deal buster. The value of EyeTV is the ability to bring a near-TiVo experience to your Mac, which allows you to record television video, and export the TV shows to iTunes, iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, or nearly anywhere else. Add Elgato’s Turbo 264 to your Mac, and the encoding process to convert your TV shows for Apple’s other toys is up to five times faster.

That presents the second biggest challenge in handling television and video media on your Mac (the first challenge is the video content producers who don’t provide video in the first place, and who won’t like Apple if they build a DVR into every Mac).

Recording an hour-long television show in EyeTV takes an hour. That’s the same as it takes in TiVo or the cable companies DVR (at $10 a month, the ‘rented’ DVR gets expensive, which makes EyeTV a bargain in a couple of years).

Converting the video that EyeTV recorded so you can make it available to your iPod or iPhone may take another hour or longer for that same one hour TV show. That’s because the conversion process is CPU intensive. Elgato’s Turbo 264 is a little USB device that works with EyeTV to speed up the conversion process, usually three times as fast, sometimes nearly five times faster.

Granted, this kind of extra power should be a part of every Mac, but the reality is, well, it’s not.

We like to think of our Mac’s as the center of the digital world of gadgets we own, and it used to be. Increasingly, the digital hub is represented by iTunes and QuickTime, Mac or Windows. Our Macs, iPods, iPhones, and AppleTV are the peripherals around the Apple digital hub.

What Mac users (and Windows users of iTunes, and iPod owners) really want is to purchase video and audio media once, as in, one time, and then be able to play it, listen to it, view it whenever and wherever we choose. That’s fair use.

Of course, media content companies have a vested interest in charging us for every use wherever they can.

Even Apple is getting in the act by charging 99-cents for iTunes/iPhone ringtones. Granted, it’s a bargain compared to the cell phone networks, but it’s 99-cents to play 30-seconds of the same music I’ve already paid for.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Elgato’s new EyeTV, which does much more than the cable TV DVR or TiVo, since the TV shows you record can easily be moved from device to device, and now streamed wirelessly from your Mac to an iPod touch or iPhone.

Now, if there were just a way to stream my video and music over the internet to all my wireless devices. Hmmm…

Got a complaint, perspective, rant, or observation regarding music or video and your right to view or listen as you wish? Talk Back to Mac360 readers in the Comments section below.