Technology reviews

It might seem at first, humble reader, from this delightful blog that I am a “thought leader” and “opinion former” of the highest order. In actual fact, I am very easily led.

Case in point: the Elgato turbo.264. I read reviews of it in MacFormat and Macworld and thought to myself “I need one of those!”

The reason for this is simple: Bastard, my PVR, takes forever to export stuff into a format that my iPod or Apple TV can cope with. I record The F-Word, it lasts an hour, and Bastard takes two or three hours to export it at a reasonable video quality. I don’t especially want to be leaving my Mac on all night – not very environmentally friendly is it? – so anything that speeds the process up and reduces electricity consumption has to be good.

The Turbo.264 is what I need, apparently. At least, that’s what I’ve been told.

Continue reading “Review: Turbo.264”

Most people won’t care, but Apple today updated its Apple TV device to include YouTube support

It also updated it with a couple of other useful extras at the same time. You can now select the appropriate iTunes Store for your country to make sure the “iTunes Top TV episodes” and “iTunes movies” options don’t appear unless you’re in the US because you can’t buy bloody anything from the iTunes Store unless you’re in the US.

You can also sort things by date, which is helpful if you don’t name your files properly or the cocking useless Apple TV sorts things out of order.

How about a “play stuff that’s recorded in some format I might actually have” option, Apple?

It’ll be going up on the Macworld site soon or appearing in the print mag later, but here’s my look at the Miglia TVMax+. Ssh, don’t tell anyone. But feel free to ask questions, in case you need clarifications: they’re quite technical at Macworld.

Continue reading “Review: Miglia TVMax+”

Bastard, my PVR, works with a program called EyeTV, which is actually rather good. As you may know, I also have an Apple TV, which is growing on me a bit and my wife’s starting to like, too, but is still going to be a bit rubbish for most people.

So, joy of joy, Elgato, which makes the EyeTV software, updated it last night to make it AppleTV friendly. Look!

Select a recording, click on the Apple TV button, and EyeTV exports it in the top quality resolution demanded by the Apple TV. You can also set recordings to automatically export to the Apple TV when they’ve finished.

Note, it’s an either/or thing with the Apple TV and the iPod: either you go for something that will play on the iPod and the Apple TV but not at top resolution, or you make it an Apple TV-only export. Curses.

Equally curse-worthy is the fact that EyeTV uses QuickTime (aka “TakingItsOwnSweetTime”) to do the exports. I recorded The Apprentice: You’re Fired last night. That’s a 1GB file. I started exporting it at 9.03. It’s now 10.21 and the blessed thing is only three-quarters of the way through, despite being a half-hour show. It’s also 460MB in size already.

Compare that with iSquint, which takes about 45 minutes to do a 60 minute programme, even at full res, and you’ll understand the problem. That only does iPod-quality mind, so I’ve just purchased Visual Hub from the same people. That does full Apple TV resolution, too. I’ll let you know how that works out once I’ve played with it.

As you may also know, I’ve been sent a Miglia TVMax+ to play with. That records in the iPod/Apple TV’s native format, meaning no nasty conversion is necessary. At the moment, it doesn’t play nicely with EyeTV (or more accurately, EyeTV doesn’t play nicely with it) and comes with some rubbish software of its own. But it does do what it says on the tin, as they say, even if I accidentally used the wrong settings the first time, and couldn’t get an episode of America’s Next Top Model we’d recorded from the Sky box onto the Apple TV because it was too high a resolution.

More on that when I’ve played with it some more.