Not so fast. It's not what you think. I'm not asking if you might use sneaky illegal means to watch TV programmes. I want to know if you watch network TV programmes legally on the Internet, whether it's on the iPlayer, 4oD, Hulu, the good old Apple iTunes store or some other service. if you do, how do you do it – on a computer or some other device? Do you ever buy the content or do you stick to free only? And do you splurge for high-def if it's available?
And if you don't watch downloads, why not?
FYI, I use both my Nintendo Wii and my iPhone to access the iPlayer and I use my Apple TV, iTunes and iPhone to purchase TV content, preferably in high def. But how about you?
As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog.
So I have this thing called an Elgato Turbo.264 that plugs into my Mac. It's designed to speed up video conversion, which it does more or less: anything I've recorded on my EyeTV gets exported to my iPhone or AppleTV a whole lot quicker than without it, other things not so less. Still, it integrates nicely with Video Drive, which has been giving me problems of late with regular old QuickTime, so it's hard to do without.
Trouble is, it's having problems with other videos now, particularly AVIs.
For a big chunk of this week, I've been fighting to the death with an Elgato EyeTV Sat box. This is a nifty little gadget that lets you get Freesat on your Mac, including BBC HD in full high def quality, provided you
Live in the UK
Have a satellite dish and a spare lead from it somewhere
Have £180 or so
The full review is going to be in MacFormat issue 212, so you'll have to wait until then for my full review of it. However, one of the issues I had was actually tuning it to receive all the Freesat channels, since the auto-tune failed to pick up big chunks of them (including Channel 4, More4, E4, Film4, BBC3, BBC4, ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4 as well as their time-shifted siblings). Elgato swear this shouldn't be a problem, but it was.
Fortunately, after a bit of liaising with Elgato over the settings, I was able to get all the channels. Since Elgato doesn't seem to want to publish them on its web site according to my exchanges with them – and since MacFormat simply won't have the space to print all this – after the jump, all the settings an EyeTV Sat owner might need to get his or her box working properly.
I suspect I might get as many as 10 or even 20 hits on this page, but I figured it might be useful to some people. The rest of you? As you were.
I've only had a Wii for five months* and the option's been there for a year, apparently, but it's news to me that you can watch the BBC's iPlayer on the Wii, so I thought I'd belatedly pass the word.
I haven't tested it yet, and it's not as good quality as you can get on a PC, since the Wii has an old version of Flash, but all the same, much better to be able to watch it on your TV than huddled round a computer.
* Bought at my wife's insistence, I would point out, since games consoles and working from home don't mix unless you're a games journalist/professional games player
The hardware may have changed, but Bastard, my PVR, continues to be a bastard.
And it all looked so different a couple of weeks, when I discovered he could now record two things at once. Cracking! No more worrying about scheduling conflicts, no more worrying that the end of episode one is going to get recorded on the beginning of episode two if there's an over-run.
Marvellous.
Except I updated him to version 3.1.1 of his EyeTV software, which worked fine in most regards, except with exports. Suddenly, little Bastard didn't like to export programs with their soundtracks intact. I didn't realise this until about a week later, by which time I'd deleted the originals.
Curses.
So I downgraded back to 3.1, using Elgato's preferred method. Except I didn't restart my computer since they didn't ask me to. Now Bastard won't start recording unless EyeTV is already running. The problem went away after a restart, but not before it had failed to record one programme: American Outlaws, starring Ali Larter.
My trailing cable has arrived to save the day. The aerials on my EyeTV Diversity turned out to be complete pants, so a 15m trailing cable was needed to restore little known networks such as ITV1 and Channel 4 to my channel roster.
Fortunately, someone had already had a cable running round the place once, and had left all the tacks behind, so with just a couple of cable ties, I've managed to make said trailing cable almost entirely invisible.
And look, I have my line-up back:
And with decent signal: this means I get picture-in-picture, too: record one channel and watch another at the same time. Incidentally, note how, even though they're been fed by the same aerial, the two tuners have substantially different signal qualities.
Woo hoo. So now I have a decent, non breaking-up version of this week's Being Human, too. One thing to note: if you buy a signal splitter so that you can have two aerials coming out of one TV socket, check to see if you're getting male or female connections or else you'll find your cables won't work. Doh.
PS If by chance you also happen to buy a Heroes mousemat off eBay, be prepared: it might smell a bit.
Well, finally, after all that fun with the Sky+ competition last year, I have Sky+HD. As you may recall, I was this close to getting it when at the last moment, I found out you need two feeds from the satellite dish to be able to record a programme while watching another, so we never got it. Fortunately, at our new flat, there are two wall feeds from the communal satellite dish (even if one, for some strange reason that even the Sky engineers couldn't fathom, is on the other side of the room from the other feed).
As it happens, I made a slight cost saving from delaying, since the cost installation and the box has gone down from £75 (reduced from £150) to £49. Bargain.
So, after a few days, what am I reckoning, apart from it's all worth it just to see Ali Larter in high def on Heroes?
About the blog
This is a UK media blog with daily news, views, exclusive reviews and good conversation. There's a bit of a bias towards the latest and greatest US TV, but we also cover British TV ranging from new Doctor Who to old Z Cars, Property Ladder to Big Brother, and BBC4 to S4C – yes, this blog is firmly part of the conspiracy to promote all things Welsh where possible, particularly Caerdydd.
Add in film, theatre, art, books, events and media journalism and you've (hopefully) got one of the best places on the web for media lovers. Oh yes, and there's The Carusometer, the ultimate guide to quality TV.
About me
I'm Rob Buckley, a freelance journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of. I've edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for trade magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and contributed sarcastic articles about television to the blink-and-you-missed-it "web site for urban hedonists" The Tribe. I'm freelance now and have contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly and TV Scoop. Have pity on me.
Read more on Friday's Sitting Tennant (week 11, 2010)