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ForMac Studio TVR
- Thread starter c2kvette
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If you are talking about the external box which uses USB to connect to your mac, then my brother has one and it works pretty good. The channels are all clear, but you can't use it for replacing a TV unfortunately. It is not that good. It works just as good as tv card for a windows machine. It works better however then my Village tronic TV ad on card which came with a voodoo3 graphics card which I use for my second monitor in my B&W.
if i'm not mistaken, the formac studio tvr records tv shows in DV format. In case you're not familiar with DV, it is high-quality, but a HD hog. To record a lot of stuff (a la Tivo) you need a massive HD. A similar product that records in mpeg 2 is the eyetv. I haven't used one, but I've heard good things about the eyetv recorder.
I just recently got one of these and I rate it a B+.
Pros:
1. You can watch TV -- whatever channels you get through cable or antenna.
2. Set up is pretty simple.
3. You can record television to your hard drive as .dv files.
4. It also acts as a video and audio digitizer, letting you make dv files of any VCR tape or old home movie you want.
Cons:
1. If you want to do any type of editing to the files you record off of television with iMovie, then you have to make sure to either (a) set the recording up to record into iMovie or (b) make sure that you stop the recording before the clip runs over 2GB (about 10 minutes). Note that this is really a limitation within iMovie, but the TVR documentation doesn't really make this clear.
2. The TVR seems to come with software to compress .dv files into mpeg files (much smaller). This software seems to be defective in some way. I've tried using it on two Macs (my 500MHz TiBook and a friend's 1.25GHz 15" AlBook) and on both machines the program would simply disappear in progress (not even an "unexpectedly quit" message).
Pros:
1. You can watch TV -- whatever channels you get through cable or antenna.
2. Set up is pretty simple.
3. You can record television to your hard drive as .dv files.
4. It also acts as a video and audio digitizer, letting you make dv files of any VCR tape or old home movie you want.
Cons:
1. If you want to do any type of editing to the files you record off of television with iMovie, then you have to make sure to either (a) set the recording up to record into iMovie or (b) make sure that you stop the recording before the clip runs over 2GB (about 10 minutes). Note that this is really a limitation within iMovie, but the TVR documentation doesn't really make this clear.
2. The TVR seems to come with software to compress .dv files into mpeg files (much smaller). This software seems to be defective in some way. I've tried using it on two Macs (my 500MHz TiBook and a friend's 1.25GHz 15" AlBook) and on both machines the program would simply disappear in progress (not even an "unexpectedly quit" message).
I couldn't be happier. It's expensive though. Sure DV is a drive hog, but I have over a half terabyte, so it's not much of an issue. Making DV's out of my old family VHS tapes was REQUIRED when I searched for a solution, and the TVR works perfectly in that way.
The case design is sucky, though. Organic, white, too big... and it just doesn't fit on or in anything. Bottom line is that it does what it does perfectly, if you don't mind storing the bubble somehow.
The case design is sucky, though. Organic, white, too big... and it just doesn't fit on or in anything. Bottom line is that it does what it does perfectly, if you don't mind storing the bubble somehow.
I'm guessing you mean Direct TV, and unless it has some sort of special output, I would think you'll be fine. The TVR has RCA, Coax, S-Video and FW400 in and out, so I'd suspect that the output from the DTV system would match with one of those.
Right. DirecTV comes into the house on a coax cable, like regular cable TV. The feed goes to reciever where it is decoded. It has to go through the receiver. From there, it can go to TV via coax, RCA or s-video.
So I could just run the s-video into this thing? If so, that would be quite cool.
Exactly. I have a digital cable box with coax and component output. I send the coax to the TV and the component to the TVR so I don't have to unhook anything.
Really? That sucks
. So if I wanted to get this to record an hour long TV show, and edit out the commericals in iMovie, it is not possible?Have they updated their software to fix these errors....or do they never update their software?
--Waluigi