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May 24

Elgato’s EyeTV HD records shows to your Mac, slings live to your iPad

Posted in: cable, dvr, hands-on, ipad, streaming, Today's Chili, TV

How’s that Apple tattoo treating you? Good, good. Well, Elgato has something for the faithful: the new EyeTV HD. The device grabs a 1080i signal over component from your DVR or cable box or Blu-ray player, and records that video to your Mac using Elgato’s own desktop DVR software. The shows can then be auto-transcoded to iPhone or iPad-friendliness, providing you a bit of much needed Animal Planet during your commute the next day. That’s all well and good, but the real kicker is the live streaming the device can push to your iPad or iPhone, using an IR blaster to change the channel on your cable box. It’s all rosy except for the fact that you’ll need to plug this directly into your Mac and your cable box, meaning that they’ll have to be in fairly close proximity (there’s a six foot USB cable included). The unit retails for $200 and is available now directly from Elgato or Apple stores. PR is after the break.

We haven’t plugged in the box yet, but we played around with Elgato’s setup using an iPad 3G and found it pretty impressive. The streaming quality isn’t really at, say, a Netflix level (it’s more suited to a phone screen), but it’s certainly passable, and the interface for browsing your own channels and recordings is very pleasant. We also loved the inclusion of meta data and chapters in the recorded shows and movies that had been loaded onto the device (you can check that out in the gallery below). Elgato might’ve just released the most elegant “analog hole” yet.

Gallery: Elgato EyeTV HD press shots