They are displayed just like a show you would have purchased from the iTunes store, with the following exception:
-The graphical "icon" for that particular show episode is not the show's "poster art", but the first frame of the EyeTV recording (which may be an ad, so it is not necessarily indicative of what is in the show). But EyeTV thought of this, which is why the icon also has a horizontal gray band at the top and bottom of the icon square. On the top band is the title of the show ("Star Trek: The Next Generation"), and at the bottom is the "EyeTV" logo, indicating that the show came from an EyeTV. So just looking at the icon, you can still tell what show it is, even though the photo might be misleading.
That's pretty much it: the icon is different. Otherwise it's just like any other show you have in iTunes.
Well, it has commercials unlike an iTunes-purchased show, but you can skip through those on the apple TV or in iTunes when you watch. There is actually an EyeTV applescript called "ETVComSkip" (google it) which allows EyeTV to mark the beginning and ends of commercials while it is recording. Then, when it exports to iTunes, EyeTV omits the commercials so your exported show in iTunes has no commercials to skip at all! I have this working (it involves downloading ETVComSkip, saving it to your EyeTV "scripts" directory, and possibly changing some directory names in the Applescript document), but I've found that it only works for certain networks. IE: I typically get no commercials for NBC shows, but I do get them for ABC shows. Maybe whatever signal the two networks use to mark the beginning/end of a commercial break is different, and ETVComSkip only detects one of them. *shrug* I haven't bothered hacking around to make it work with more networks. (How much effort does one want to devote just to enable more laziness? Hitting "skip ahead 30 seconds" a couple times to skip a commercial is easy enough.)
Yes. It grabs it from the EyeTV program guide, which uses information from TV Guide. So your exported show in iTunes has the same metadata that the EyeTV recording itself has: Show name, episode title, air date, and description. And all that metadata appears both in iTunes and your Apple TV. You don't have to do any "tagging" like you would if you were ripping a DVD movie or show, for example. EyeTV does that with no effort from you.
Remember, that TV Guide info is the $20/year fee you are paying for: it gets you the ability to browse and schedule using a program guide, and provides metadata for your recordings. (It's actually free the first year and then $20/year after that.)
No. I store them on an external firewire800 1 TB drive. But you certainly could store them on an NAS if you wanted to. All that matters is that EyeTV and iTunes can see the recordings. Your storage of the recordings is left for you to manage what works best.
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(What follows below is a detailed and perhaps scary explanation of how I customized my storage for my particular needs. Please don't let it scare you away from using EyeTV. The default settings are probably fine for most people.)
I should clarify:
If you're using EyeTV to auto-export to iTunes like we are talking about, there will be two versions for each individual recording.
1. The EyeTV recording in an uncompressed format (2-7 GB for a one hour show, depending on SD vs. HD). This is the file that would play if you watch the show in the EyeTV program.
2. The compressed show that is exported to iTunes in a .m4v format (usually 1-3 GB for an hour, depending on SD vs. HD). This is what you can see via Homesharing on your Apple TV.
#1 is stored in your "EyeTV Recordings" folder, which you can set in EyeTV's preferences to be wherever you want, on whatever drive you want (internal or external). Mine are stored on the external.
#2 is a bit harder to control, and I found it to be a bit unintuitive. By default, EyeTV dumps the exported show into the iTunes Media folder on your mac's internal hard drive. This works fine, requires no extra setup from you, and may be your best option if you have plenty of room on your internal drive.
The only down side is that you will tend to have less available storage space on your internal hard drive. You can only delete the .m4v file from iTunes on your Mac, or manually in the Finder. You can't delete it from your Apple TV. So if you are like me, you'll finish watching a show on your couch or in bed, and then you don't want to get up and walk over to the computer to delete the show right that moment. (I just hold the select button on my Apple TV remote, select "Mark as watched", and watch as the show is removed from the "unwatched" list on the screen. So I "check it off" that way.) But then you end up having to delete a bunch of shows every week or however often you need to get your many GBs of internal storage back on your mac. It's not a big deal to have a "deleting session" like this once every while.
But I didn't have all that much free space on my internal drive (it's a macbook pro), so I was having to delete the shows from iTunes every couple of days. So I wanted to store the exported .m4vs on my external drive, and just have them visible to iTunes without actually being copied into the iTunes media folder. (The equivalent of option+dragging the files into iTunes, which lets you "import" them without "copying" them.) This would mean I could wait longer between "deleting sessions", since my external drive had lots of free space and I wouldn't be taking up valuable internal drive space. This is where I hit a snag, and ended up with a convoluted workaround.
the snag:
EyeTV always puts a copy of the exported file on your internal drive IF you are using the "Apple TV" or "iPad" settings selected in the "export" pulldown menu for a scheduled recording. There is no built-in option to tell EyeTV that you want the exported .m4v file stored in a particular place other than the iTunes Media folder. You simply tell it to export the recording or not (as an "Apple TV" or "iPad" or "iPhone" setting), and it does the rest. So I tried to trick EyeTV by moving my iTunes Media folder to the external drive. I figured EyeTV would notice that the iTunes Media folder was on an external drive, and put the exported show in there. Instead, once the iTunes Media Folder was no longer on my internal drive, EyeTV put its exported recordings in the "Movies" directory in my user home directory (/Users/dgalvan/Movies). If I wanted the file to actually get recognized by iTunes, I had to check the "copy imported media files to iTunes Media Folder" in iTunes' preferences, and the show in my Movies directory would get auto-imported to iTunes and copied into the iTunes Media Folder as well. But then I'd have two copies of the .m4v: one on my internal drive in the Movies directory AND one on the external drive in the iTunes Media folder! So moving my iTunes Media folder to my external drive didn't solve my storage problem.
the workaround:
Luckily, EyeTV plays well with Applescripts. If there's not a clear way to do something in the EyeTV GUI, you can probably do it with an Applescript. So I cobbled together a script (mostly from what others had posted online, with some minimal changes from me related to the actual directory paths) that I placed in the EyeTV --> scripts --> triggered directory. The way this script works is as follows: Any time an EyeTV recording is finished, the script is triggered. (since it is in the "triggered" directory). Once triggered, the script immediately starts transcoding the Eye TV recording (#1 above) and producing a .m4V (#2) recording. At this point in the script, you can specify where that #2 recording is stored, and I have it set to store in a directory on my external drive. Then in the applescript you can issue a command to "send to iTunes", which basically just sends iTunes the link to the file without copying the file into the iTunes Media Folder.
So, my setup now works so that both the #1 and #2 recordings are stored on an external drive (one in an "EyeTV Recordings" folder, the other in a "EyeTV Exports" folder), with no recordings saved to my internal drive. It was a bit unintuitive to setup, but it works fine. And since it is a triggered script, the recording exports whether or not I have selected the "export" option in the EyeTV GUI, so I no longer have to remember to do that when I set up a recording in EyeTV.
If anyone is interested, I can post my applescript.
please and thanks in advance