I have long been annoyed that there is no solution for DVB-T2 on OS X.
I finally gave up at the end of last year and bought a cheap stand-alone unit (the August DVB400) in the hope that there will be a decent OS X solution eventually, but this should do until then. It only cost about £35, you can plug a flash drive or hard drive into its USB port to record SD or HD programmes.
The nicest thing about this over many other DVRs is it stores the recordings as .MTS video files, meaning you can play them back on a computer, including macs, using VLC or anything else that supports .MTS files.
The quality is great as long as you have a decent aerial signal, for HD especially.
The bad thing about .MTS files is that they are a bit of a pain to get into any other format apparently, meaning editing down overlapping minutes at the beginning and end of a programme is a hassle if you don't want to re-encode, losing quality in already heavily compressed HD.
Another point to bear in mind is that you realistically have to have an NTFS-formatted external hard drive/flash drive for recordings, as a FAT32 drive will chop the recordings into 500MB-ish chunks.
And finally the EPG doesn't cover the HD channels, so you have to manually set them (which you might want to anyway to give a couple of minutes padding to make sure you get whole programmes). More about this below...
But: at ~£35 + whatever your re-usuable media costs it's not bad for now. I use a powered USB hard drive I formatted in my old Windows VM (tied to my old laptop which is not capable of a Windows HD stick sadly!).
Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/August-DVB400-Freeview-Set-Top/dp/B00BPAZGCG
- Also available on ebay, currently a few quid cheaper:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/August-DV...B-T-Tuner-with-USB-TV-Recording-/271313839079
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OK, also in researching for reasons why this ludicrous gap in the market exists, I stumbled upon what may be a large part of the reason (seeing as Elgato are very quiet about everything)
You'll note above how I say there is no EPG for the HD channels on the August DVB400 right? Well I think I know why.
The BBC apparently have some control over the Freeview HD EPG data for the UK. In a deal to suit content providers, they make it a condition of decoding the HD EPG data that a manufacturer's device doesn't let users export HD recordings off the device in a usable format. This must be why all the big-name Freeview HD DVR/PVRs with EPGs for the HD channels are setup this way. The rationale the BBC use is that without this restriction, it would make it harder to obtain content from creators in the first place.
Here's a relevant bit from an Ofcom statement regarding the topic:
It goes on to detail how the lookup tables for decoding the HD EPG data will only be provided to manufacturers who play nice, basically. Personally I think the whole thing stinks, but never mind. I can see the BBC's rationale, but I regard it as based on rather flawed premises from the 3rd party content creators, and it's a nice shield for the beeb to hide behind which doesn't address first-party in-house content like their news programming.
Anyway, the full statement is available at:
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/content_mngt/statement/statement.pdf
If anyone wants to read the whole thing.
Now for Elgato's EyeTV of course, not having an EPG for HD channels available would be a rather annoying thing. I'd be quite interested to know if users of the Elgato Satfree satellite DVB-S/S2 product does or doesn't have any issue with the EPG though
that would rather render the reasoning behind the Freeview HD restrictions rather pointless. From its webpage it doesn't seem to mention any restrictions. Weird. I'd also like to know from anyone who has a Windows DVB-T2 solution and if they have had any issues getting over-the-air EPG data for HD channels, or whether ways round it have been found (I guess using an internet-based EPG would do the trick).
Anyway, I hope this has shed some light on what is possibly (I think probably(?)) at least partially behind the lack of DVB-T2 solutions on OS X at present, from Elgato if not others.
As others have said, if other countries start using it then hopefully UK Freeview users will have a better chance of Elgato (or someone else) making an OS X solution, even if the over-the-air EPG for HD channels remains an issue. For my August DVB400, they obviously decided to just forgo the EPG. Good for them, it is the correct decision in my view.
And well done for getting to the end of this post.
[1] http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/content_mngt/statement/statement.pdf Section 2, sub-section 2.4, published 14 June 2010
