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EyeTV App Pulled, New Version Submitted to Apple

Cory Bohon — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:11:51 -0500

Yesterday many people discovered that the EyeTV application from Elgato allowed anyone with an EyeTV to stream live television from their Mac to the iPhone over the AT&T 3G network. Apple later pulled the application from the App Store, but a new version is already in the works.

Elgato released a statement early this morning saying, "Some test code that enabled live TV streaming over the cellular network was accidentally left in the the EyeTV App. Apple requested that we remove the code since their agreement with AT&T does not allow redirecting TV signals over the cellular network. The code was removed and a 1.0.1 version of the EyeTV app was submitted. We expect EyeTV to return to the App Store when the 1.0.1 version is approved."

Unfortunately for the people who purchased this application, they are unable to download it again at the present time, but for those that own the 1.0 version, you now have access to live streaming over AT&T's network. However, due to AT&T's stance on live streaming video over the network, we're unsure of what consequences might arise from continued use of this application on their network.

via Elgato PR

EyeTV App Lets You Stream Over 3G

Cory Bohon — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:08:42 -0500

A "work around" in the EyeTV application for iPhone lets you stream your television from your Mac over the AT&T 3G network, but probably not for long.

Electric Pig reports on this interesting way to get the EyeTV software to allow streaming over 3G:

"Elgato’s EyeTV app requires you register your Mac to its free My EyeTV service in order to tap into broadcasts outside the house, but use it when your iPhone has only a 3G connection and you’ll see an error pop up, warning that “Live TV playback requires a Wi-Fi network connection.” Tap the OK button, and the app will act as if it can’t receive broadcasts. However, tap the text of the warning message instead, and the Eye TV app will stream live TV over a 3G connection."

But if you want this functionality, you better hurry to download the Elgato EyeTV application from the App Store [iTunes link] because Apple will probably pull it soon after they hear this information.

via 9to5 Mac

Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard Troubleshooting Roundup

David W. Martin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:59:30 -0500

Apple's Mac OS X v10.6 was released last Friday and for most of us the transition from Leopard to Snow Leopard went by without incident. However, we've spent part of last weekend scouring Apple's discussion boards and support site for solutions to problems people have been reporting with the upgrade.

Gray screen after Snow Leopard Installation

If you start your Mac and get a gray screen after upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard try reinstalling Snow Leopard. If you haven't upgraded from Leopard yet, make sure that all updates have been applied to Leopard and then try upgrading to Snow Leopard again.

Apple lists incompatible software for Snow Leopard

You can see a list of applications that Apple considers incompatible with Snow Leopard here. The Snow Leopard installer will locate these applications and move them to a folder outside of the applications folder to a folder named Incompatible Software.

Printer and Scanner Software

A listing of compatible printers and scanners can be found by reading this Apple Support Document.

Problems playing media from Apple video editing applications

If you are having problems playing media that you created using Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Express, or iLife, then according to this Apple support document, insert the install disk from any of the three applications above and re-run the installer. An updated list of media formats supported by QuickTime X can be found here.

Exported or Printed Aperture 2.1.4 images suffer color shift

If you have Aperture 2.1.4, which is updated after installing Snow Leopard, and notice color shifting when exporting or printing images, then you need to read this Apple support article.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 not installing in Boot Camp after Snow Leopard Upgrade

A number of users reported problems with the installation of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP on Macs running Boot Camp after upgrading to Snow Leopard. Users will encounter the following error:

An error occurred while copying file osloader.ntd. Cannot copy file to destination directory. Click Retry to retry the operation or click Cancel.

Detailed instructions on how to resolve this problem can be found in this Apple support document.

Elgato's EyeTV - No video, digital audio or crashes on startup

Elgato is reporting that EyeTV versions 3.0 through 3.0.4 are not compatible with Snow Leopard and they recommend that you download the EyeTV 3.1.3b1 version. Note, the download is only valid during the current beta period. More information about their products and compatiblity with Snow Leopard can be found here.

Time Machine - missing backups

Apple's discussion boards are lighting up with complaints about Time Machine after upgrading to Snow Leopard. One of the biggest complaints is that their previous backups have vanished. Well the fact is they haven't vanished at all. There is a quirk in Snow Leopard - simply rebooting and launcing Time Machine again fixes the problem for everyone that has tried that so far. I checked two of my own Macs and found this to be the case -- nothing was gone, but for whatever reason Snow Leopard would not find it until the second time I launched Time Machine.

Time Machine backups located on boot volume

Snow Leopard will not install onto a boot volume that also contains your Time Machine backups. According to Apple a workaround is to drag your "Backups.backupd" from the root level of the hard drive to the Trash. Entering your admin password when prompted. DO NOT EMPTY the trash unless you have a copy of that folder on another drive. Drag the folder from the Trash to the Desktop. You will now be able to install Snow Leopard.

Elgato Video Capture

Arvind Srinivasan — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:08:34 -0500

If you were a kid (or had a kid) any time between the mid-1980s and the turn of the century, chances are you have a bunch of old videotapes with incriminating footage on them. Chances are also good that your mother (or someone like her) has probably bothered you on more than one occasion about converting those aforementioned tapes—because really, who uses a VCR anymore? Using Elgato’s Video Capture, you can turn any analog source into 640x480 digital video files, for playback on your Mac, iPod touch, or iPhone.

The device itself is both sleek and functional and can be stashed in a pocket easily. Video Capture features composite and S-Video outs, so it’ll easily slurp in signals from DVD players, DVRs, video cameras, and other sources with analog outputs. There’s also an included Composite-to-SCART adapter, although SCART is a French standard that never gained much traction outside certain European countries.

Editing controls let you quickly trim footage.

On the software end, however, we found that Elgato’s solution is lacking in the features department. Though utilitarian, it’s simple at the cost of being too simple. First, processing video is incredibly system intensive. On our test Mac, a 2.4GHz dual-core MacBook Pro, the software used all the processing muscle of one CPU and half of the second during the entire conversion, making it impossible to do much of anything else.

We found that Elgato records video at approximately 13MB per minute—a 90-minute video at 640x480 came in at a whopping 1.1GB. Comparatively, when we used HandBrake, the resulting file size was a relatively svelte (and much more portable-device-friendly) 600MB. While we could have compressed the video with third-party software, it’s an additional step, not to mention another encoding, which can affect video quality. Using a variety of sources, the resulting video was consistently a tad darker than it should be, requiring us to crank up the brightness when watching clips encoded by Elgato’s software. The biggest miss, however, is the lack of a pause function while recording, for editing down clips as you encode them. The software does offer a timer function, which can stop recording in 30-minute increments, but you can’t enter your own record times, and you have to trim the excess blank video after the fact.

Video Capture’s editing and sharing capabilities worked well, but there were a few glitches. For example, the trimming functionality was seriously confusing. It’s color-coded, but there’s no clear indication of what the individual colors stand for. Furthermore, even though we tried logging in with several different YouTube accounts to upload our video to the service, it perplexingly only worked when we used a Google Account. On the other hand, the one-click iMovie export was glitch-free. That said, if you have a huge video file, we suggest you open it directly from iMovie—export makes another copy of the file for you to import into iMovie, but multiple copies of large videos can quickly chew through even the largest hard drives.

Elgato Turbo.264 HD

Ray Aguilera — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:39:04 -0500

It seems like everyone is drowning in video these days. With everything from full-sized camcorders to pocket-sized mini cams capable of shooting in HD, not to mention your DVD collection, there are endless hours of content to be watched. But ask anyone who’s ever waited for hours while converting video with H.264 encoders--for playback on an iPhone, Apple TV, or MacBook, for example--and it’s clear that video can be cumbersome for most consumers, even on recent Mac hardware. Elgato’s Turbo.264 HD aims to make converting video for use on your devices easier. It works with pretty much any kind of video, whether it’s something you shot yourself or video you ripped from your Welcome Back, Kotter DVD collection. Not that you’d do anything like that, of course.

The new Turbo.264 supports full 1080p.

Turbo.264 HD is a hardware video encoder and accelerator. The USB thumb drive–style form factor makes it easy to use, a theme that carries over into the bundled software. All you have to do is drag your video files into the app’s window, choose an encoding resolution, and you’re off. A previous incarnation of the hardware encoded standard-def video content, but the new HD version can handle both 720p and full 1080p HD video.

For home-movie mavens, the Turbo.264 HD has several handy tricks up its sleeve. Converting videos and uploading the results to YouTube is a one-click operation, once you’ve entered your YouTube credentials. It also speeds up transfers from your AVCHD camcorder and gooses video exports from iMovie, Final Cut Pro, QuickTime Pro, and Elgato’s own EyeTV hardware. Simple edit tools also allow you to preview clips and trim them before you spend the time encoding them in other formats. Using the Turbo.264 HD with iMovie ’09, we exported a 9-minute, 35-second HD video clip using settings for Apple TV in 5 minutes, 27 seconds. Using iMovie’s native export—without the Turbo.264—the exact same export took 16 minutes, 28 seconds.

Turbo.264 HD speeds up H.264 video conversions...making it easier to cram the Bluth family into your iPhone.

Even if you’re not an amateur Scorsese or Warren Miller, the Turbo.264 HD comes in handy for converting DVDs for playback on your MacBook or iPhone. Of course, breaking the copy protection--it’s so easy, can it really even be called breaking anymore?—is still technically illegal, but if you were to happen upon some DVD video that somehow got decrypted, the Turbo.264 HD makes quick work of it. A 28-minute, 36-second episode of Arrested Development took a mere 4 minutes, 54 seconds to convert for use on an iPhone, using a 3.06GHz iMac with 4GB of RAM.

As for the video quality, we found that videos encoded with the Turbo.264 HD didn’t look quite as good as the same video encoded with iMovie ’09, but for most personal applications, the dramatic increases in encoding speed were worth the small hit to quality.

Elgato EyeTV 3

Zack Stern — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:24:40 -0500

Smart Guides narrow down shows and automatically record upcoming broadcasts of, say, your favorite sports team.

Digital video recorders that connect to a TV rely on a hardware-and-software combination to capture and play shows—Mac DVR solutions are no different. Tuner hardware turns airborne signals or a cable feed into something the computer understands, but it’s the software that drives the user experience. Elgato’s EyeTV 3 app is designed to work with any of the company’s TV tuners, but it also supports hardware from a dozen companies, including some that only offer PC devices. The application presents the video window, allows browsing through a channel guide, lets you make basic edits to recorded shows, and more. While its interface could be improved, most of its functionality is intuitive, wringing every last feature out of your TV tuner hardware.

We tested EyeTV 3 with Elgato’s EyeTV 250 Plus hardware (3 out of 5 stars, 12/07, p63), but the results should be the same for any of its supported tuners (see the entire list at www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/software/EyeTV3/product3.en.html). After a simple registration for the free TitanTV guide, we were able to flip through live television programs. A few ambiguous buttons make EyeTV’s floating remote too slick for our tastes, so we navigated the software with onscreen clicks instead. The software buffers live TV to allow impromptu rewinding, and we clicked directly on the timeline bar to jump to different points in previously recorded shows. Best of all, Mac-like windows allow users to browse through recordings and manage controls with a very short learning curve.

We wanted an automatic way to record all the episodes of a series, but instead we had to use the Smart Guide to manually program variables such as the name of the show and the day it airs. Still, the results can be powerful, capturing just football games with your favorite team, for example, but there are a few needless hoops to jump through just to record The Simpsons every week. Once your show has been recorded, an editing interface lets you trim unwanted bits, such as commercials. Preset export options can then process files for viewing on an iPod or Apple TV, but videophiles can also muck around with the more in-depth settings. EyeTV 3 can even serve those video files as webpages, instantly allowing locally networked computers to watch shows via a Web browser. This feature also works over the Internet with some advanced router setup.