When first we met the Turbo.264 hardware compression accelerator, it did a great job of speeding up video exports on older CPUs but didn't offer a tremendous boost on modern Intel hardware. True, it worked well with Elgato's EyeTV software to transcode TV recordings overnight for iPod or iPhone use, but not everyone needed to spend the money to recover that time.

Elgato's got an upgrade to the Turbo hardware now, the Turbo.264 HD. On the one hand, the new unit is limited to Intel Mac owners running Leopard -- leaving out the G4 and G5 users who benefited most from the speed boost of the older unit.

On the other hand, the widget has the ability to export in HD resolutions; you can do basic trim edits on clips and handle almost any input format under the sun. More importantly, the new stick brings a vital feature to HD camcorder users: on-the-fly transcoding of AVCHD video.

Mac users who have AVCHD camcorders have suffered long and loudly with the format, even though native editors like NeoScene and batch converters like VoltaicHD have simplified things a bit. While iMovie '09 and Final Cut/FCE can handle AVCHD, importing is a slow slog. The Turbo.264 HD promises to dramatically reduce importation time for AVCHD clips and offload the work of transcoding them from the computer's processor. If it works as advertised, it's going to be very popular with HD camcorder users.

The new unit is $150US and shipping now.

Elgato's EyeTV Hybrid has long been the standout among the Mac options for HD television tuners, in large part because it comes with the excellent EyeTV software for program guide info, scheduling and recording. This week, the product gets an overhaul with refreshed hardware (including an FM radio tuner) and the new 3.1 version of the application with a bundled copy of Toast Basic for DVD burning; the combo is impressive. The revised software swaps out the TitanTV electronic program guide source for the more detailed (and, after the first free year, $20 paid-subscription) TV Guide data. The new EyeTV Hybrid is immediately available in the USA and Canada for US $149.95 and works on Mac OS X 10.4.11 and higher; decoding HD content requires an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU. EyeTV 3.1 will be released as a free update for existing owners in the coming weeks.

Update: Several commenters noted that earlier versions of the hardware allowed for decoding HD content with a Core Duo (as distinct from Core 2 Duo) processor, and questioned whether anything had changed. Per the specifications page for the new unit, a Core 2 Duo chip is indeed required for 720p or 1080i content.

EyeTV's hardware has always packed some impressive functionality into a small USB dongle; however, the previous units (designed and built by OEMs like Pinnacle and Hauppauge for bundling with the EyeTV app) didn't always shine when it came to holding onto weak HDTV signals, and recordings were sometimes plagued with dropouts and jitter when used with borderline-adequate antennas. The new hardware design has been insourced to EyeTV's team and custom-built with a focus on improving signal handling; the results are pretty good.

In my preliminary testing with the new unit I got much better signal on some stations that had previously been on the fringe, and the picture is still crystal-clear (HD sporting events on a 24" iMac screen are a revelation). The only annoying quirk I saw in the EyeTV 3.1 app was a propensity for the video aspect ratio to flop between 16x9 and 4x3 as commercials or other standard-ratio content interrupted a widescreen program. Other than that, it works quite well, even with a $12 pair of Radio Shack rabbit ears.

The new TV Guide program info is quite a bit more detailed than the Titan TV or over-the-air ATSC listings, with full cast and capsule review data available. EyeTV now allows for a 'season pass' preset that will capture all episodes of a particular program, and parental controls are now implemented to allow responsible adults some control over the viewing and recording habits of the household. Recording a show is still just as easy, although you need to maintain a Titan TV account to do remote scheduling; the iPhone and iPod conversion and WiFi sharing capabilities remain as before, and can be supercharged via the turbo.264 outboard compression dongle. As always, be sure to keep plenty of hard drive space available if you want to maintain a library of HD recordings.

We'll be stopping by Elgato's booth at Macworld Expo this week for a video tour of EyeTV 3.1; if you're at the show, you can catch them at booth #2126. See the gallery below for some views of the new hardware and software.

Yesterday, I was reading through our sister site TV Squad and saw this post about Broadcast Flags that prevent PCs from recording shows. Broadcast flags, which are signals sent in a digital TV data stream, indicate whether shows should or should not be recorded by third party equipment such as PVRs. Curious, I shot off an email to Nick Freeman of Elgato to see whether my Mac-based EyeTV would block flagged recordings.

Turns out that my Macintosh is a libertarian. I can continue recording any shows I receive. Phew.

Not only did Nick get right back to me, he put up this handy info page about Elgato's position on broadcast flags: EyeTV doesn't restrict recording. EyeTV (and Elgato's software in general) ignores voluntary DRM, the kind that asks you to shoot yourself in your own foot if you don't mind thankyouverymuch.

I was blissfully ignorant of these flags until yesterday. In a world of product placement and in-screen logos, does it really make sense to keep people away from watching your shows? It's not as though I don't get the concept -- a return to appointment television where people go to the bathroom during commercial breaks instead of fast forwarding -- but it just struck me as so incredibly brain-dead in its execution.

What a pity that Microsoft chose to support this silliness with Media Center. And bravo to Elgato for deciding not to. What kinds of voluntary DRM can you think up? Let us know in the comments. Mine is broadcast-approved earplugs. Stick them in whenever you encounter sounds that might be copyright.

While we wait for Apple to cram a TV tuner or cable card into the Apple TV (don't hold your breath-- seriously), El Gato continues to pump out some nice hardware/software tools for watching the tube on your Mac. One thing that caught my eye: you can start distributing recorded live video around your house 30 seconds or so after the EyeTV starts recording a show. I remember when we had to rig some VLC nonsense together to get livestreaming on a remote machine with the old EyeTV. Oh, and they've apparently added something very similar to the Season Pass feature on Tivo, which is quite cool.

Check out a nice demo after the jump.

Expect a huge EyeTV upgrade this Tuesday. TUAW has learned that Elgato plans to release EyeTV 3.0 on Keynote day. The upgrade will be paid (free updates for anyone who bought EyeTV 2 or a tuner after Dec 1 2007) and promises lots of new features. I'm a huge EyeTV fan--I bought mine last year during their Macworld special--and am looking forward to seeing what the Elgato guys have packed into this release.

Until recently turning your Mac into a PVR has generally meant using Elgato's EyeTV (our coverage) with hardware from Elgato or a related vendor. Now, however, AMD is getting in the Mac PVR game with the ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB for Mac (say that three times fast!). The Wonder 650 has dual tuner that can receive free over-the-air ATSC high-definition content as well as standard definition NTSC content from cable or antenna. With the two tuners you can "watch analog TV while recording digital TV at the same time" (I take it that this means you can't record one HD stream while watching a different one).

In addition to the 650 itself (which includes hardware based MPEG-2 compression) the package includes ATI's tvPORTAL for Mac software. Much like EyeTV this allows you to watch and pause live video as well as set up timed recordings with a programming guide.

The ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo should be available by the end of the month for $149.

[via 123Macmini]

As we posted last week, Elgato's new EyeTV 2.5 upgrade (free to existing customers) offers WiFi video streaming. Today I finally had the opportunity to sit down and put the update to the test: to see how it worked and to see where the new technology could take me. I found that this update turned my Mac Mini into a free, low-rent slingbox. I can now bring my home TiFaux with me on the road, just by tuning in using my iPhone, iPod touch or laptop.

We've covered the Elgato EyeTV 205 before, but now the Mac video peripherals company has pushed out a substantial revision, the EyeTV 250 Plus, which adds over-the-air HDTV capability. The Plus model is in many ways like the EyeTV Hybrid, and requires a beefy Dual G5 or Intel machine to decode the HDTV stream, but like the older 250 also includes a hardware encoder for digitizing analog sources (e.g. video tapes, etc.). In addition to the included EyeTV PVR software the the 250 Plus ships with Roxio Toast 8 Basic to allow you to burn recordings to disk.

The EyeTV 250 Plus is $199.95 and is available now.

[via MacMerc]

Erica took a first look at Elgato's Turbo.264 USB video encoder last month and found it to be a mixed bag. While it is indeed a powerful accessory to many Mac user's video encoding efforts, it's only compatible with apps that use QuickTime for encoding and export, so HandBrake and VisualHub die-hards are out of luck. Still, if you use QuickTime itself, Elgato's products (such as EyeTV) or any other QuickTime-compatible video encoding apps, the Turbo.264 is a fantastic companion that is sure to make your G4, G5 or even Intel Mac jump for joy when encoding video.

While I personally don't own one yet, a new v1.1 software update from Elgato is motivating me all the more to save up and squeeze every penny out of the living room couch. One of the big-ticket new features is an iPhone-specific video setting, supporting both standard 4:3 (480 x 360) and 16:9 (480 x 270) formats. While that is definitely a cool feature, I'm more interested in another new feature (which, might I add, the rest of Elgato's video conversion software desperately needs): customizable settings for video conversion, including being able to edit the presets for devices like the Apple TV. Until now, the software included with the Turbo.264 simply offered choices like "high quality for iPod," with no ability to set things like data or compression rates. Now, finally, users have complete control over the quality of the video they output with the Turbo.264's software, and I can only hope that it's coming to their EyeTV 2 software as well.

As I said, I don't own a Turbo.264 yet, but I had the chance to test one out myself and this customization was the only major complaint I had. Now that they've fixed this issue, this $99 video encoding accessory seems more appetizing than ever.

We previously mentioned a hacked together, rudimentary Mac interface for the HDHomeRun and expressed hope for EyeTV support. Well, our wish has been granted as Elgato has announced the HDHomeRun for the Mac. The HDHomeRun is a nifty little device that features two over-the-air / Clear QAM HD tuners which decode HDTV signals and send them out over ethernet. The video can then be watched on any Mac on the network with the EyeTV software. Since there are two tuners, you can watch or record two different channels at the same time.

The EyeTV package includes the HDHomeRun as well two EyeTV licenses for $199.95.

[via MacMinute]

A few months ago, TUAW posted about the new turbo.264 USB h.264 encoder from Elgato. Recently, I've had the opportunity to test out the t.264 and metaphorically kick its tires. Here's a quick summary of what I found.

What is it? The turbo.264 is a graphics co-processor in the form of a USB dongle. You connect it to a spare USB port and use it to speed up video conversions to h.264 files. The t.264 produces h.264 video optimized for iPod, Apple TV and PSP.

How fast is it? It's pretty fast. However, newer Macintoshes are also pretty fast. It took about 3 hours to rip my copy of Serenity using t.264. It took Handbrake about 5 hours on my 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo Mac Mini with 1 GB memory. Keep in mind that QuickTime conversion to h.264 is notoriously slow. Handbrake and MPEG Streamclip provide much faster results but the off-loaded t.264 encoder beat them handily and freed up a large chunk of the main Mac's CPU cycles.

Will it make Handbrake faster? The accelerator only speeds up exports from QuickTime compatible applications. Handbrake doesn't export using QuickTime so it can't take advantage of t.264

What about other QuickTime-compatible apps? Any QuickTime application that lets you select one of the export components installed by the Turbo.264 software into /Library/QuickTime/Elgato Turbo.component can take advantage of the t.264 coprocessor. The components on offer are "Movie to Apple TV (Elgato Turbo.264)", "Movie to iPod (Elgato Turbo.264)", and "Movie to PSP (Elgato Turbo.264)". Further, the iPod export allows you to select from 640x480 and 320x240.

We've repeatedly covered the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid USB television tuner. This is an excellent little device that many of us here at TUAW own and use. On the Windows side, however, USB tuners from Hauppauge are very popular, and now Elgato has made their EyeTV software compatible with three USB tuners from Hauppauge: the Win TV Nova-T, Win TV HVR 900 and Win TV NOVA-TD. So if you already have a Hauppauge tuner you'll just need to purchase the EyeTV PVR software for €59.99 (~$80) to use it with your Mac.

In fact, this is not terribly surprising. If you run the Apple System Profiler with the EyeTV Hybrid plugged in you'll see that it is a Win TV HVR 980 under the hood, so to speak. Nonetheless, more Mac hardware support is pretty much always a good thing in my book.

[via MacNN]

The turbo.264, Elgato's hardware based H.264 encoder, is now shipping. As we mentioned it will set you back $99.95 but Elgato claims it will improve encoding speeds on Intel Macs by up to 4 times (only when using the H.264 codec). The turbo.264 includes an encoding app, but it also speeds up encoding in iMovie, Final Cut, and other popular apps (to quote their website).

I am finding myself encoding more and more video content and this little device is well worth more than $100 to me if it does what it says it does.

This week's Ask TUAW takes us into questions about printing Finder window contents, assigning programs to the corner of your screen, bringing up the Finder with a HotKey, integrating Apple productivity programs, recording TV on your Mac and editing AVIs . Remember new Mac users and Switchers who are enjoying our Mac 101 series should feel very welcome to post questions for Ask TUAW; we're happy to take questions from all levels. As always, please submit your questions by commenting to this post or using our tip form.

Elgato's new EyeTV 2.4 update is now available for download. This new update brings the Apple TV export feature we've all been waiting for. You can now record High Def shows using your HDTV-compatible EyeTV tuner and export them to iTunes using Apple TV high quality settings. Version 2.4 also adds Apple Spotlight support, IR Blaster support, and a new ScreenCapture menu item as well as a number of bug fixes.