EyeTV Hybrid US - ATSC Digital & Analog TV Tuner for Mac

I couldn't wait to get my hands on the new EyeTV Hybrid US from Elgato Systems. When I read the technical specs, and saw that it was going to offer the best of both worlds (Digital and Analog) into a small USB dongle, I knew it would be the answer many of us have been looking for, all in a quest to turn our Macintosh into a TV media center.

After extensive testing and using the EyeTV Hybrid for the last month, I am quite smitten with it. Check out their online demo, and read on and you will see why it made it into our Holiday Guide, and why I wish I didn't have to give it back.

The EyeTV Hybrid requires at lease one built-in USB 2.0 port on your Macintosh. Any Mac manufactured within the last several years will have at least one on board USB 2.0 port. If your Mac doesn't, odds are your machine isn't capable of running this unit anyway.

To get the best quality out of the EyeTV Hybrid, you really need a powerful Mac, since compression and conversion take a lot of CPU power. You can get away with a G4 processor, but if you want to really enjoy the quality this product provides, I recommend a Dual G5 processor based Mac, or even better, one of the new Intel Core Duo or Core2Duo Macs.

To decode the high resolution HDTV signals, you are going to need at least a dual G5 processor. Since this product uses the CPU for compressing the Analog stream during recording, it will require a fast CPU to do the background processing.