Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/29/review_tv_tuner_mac_elgato_eyetv_310/

Elgato EyeTV 310 HD satellite TV tuner

Watch Freesat HD on your Mac

By Cliff Joseph

Posted in Personal Tech, 29th November 2008 09:02 GMT

Review Elgato’s EyeTV 310 isn’t an entirely new product, but the recent launch of the Freesat satellite TV service has made it a bit more interesting for TV addicts here in the UK.

Elgato EyeTV 310

Elgato's EyeTV 310: now available over here

Most of the EyeTV range consists of conventional TV tuners – such as the recently reviewed EyeTV DTT and EyeTV Deluxe – that allow you to watch and record terrestrial TV channels, either analogue or digital, on your computer. However, the EyeTV 310 is one of the few digital satellite tuners that we’ve seen designed for use with personal computers – and the only one available for the Mac. It’s also the most expensive product in the EyeTV range, costing a somewhat eye-watering £240, compared to just £40 for the EyeTV DTT.

It’s a lot bigger too. Instead of the compact design of the EyeTV DTT, the 310 looks like a small set-top box, measuring 220 x 155 x 3.6mm. That means you won’t be slipping it into your bag so that you can watch TV when you’re on the road with your MacBook laptop.

In fact, you won’t be using it with the new MacBooks at all, as the EyeTV 310 uses a Firewire interface to connect to the host machine, rather than the USB port used by most conventional TV tuners. Apple has dropped Firewire from the new MacBook models that it released recently - though not the more expensive MacBook Pro - and seems to be losing interest in Firewire altogether, which doesn’t augur well for the EyeTV 310’s long-term future.

In addition to its Firewire interface, the EyeTV 310 also has an antenna connector that can accept an RG-6 coaxial satellite cable. This allows you to connect it to the feed from a Freesat satellite dish or from a comparable satellite system such as a Sky+ box. We yanked the cable out of our Sky+ box and switched it over to the EyeTV 310 and were able to pick up Freesat without too much trouble. Of course, Freesat isn’t the only satellite service available in Europe, but it’s the only ‘free to air’ service that’s made any real progress here in the UK, so that was our first port of call.

Elgato EyeTV 310

Connects by Firewire

Setting up the EyeTV 310 took just a few seconds, as you simply need to plug in the power, Firewire and satellite cables, but tracking down the Freesat broadcasts took a little longer. If you use an ordinary terrestrial TV tuner then the ‘Auto-Tune’ option built into Elgato’s EyeTV software will automatically scan the airwaves to detect the TV signals available in your area. However, picking up broadcasts from an orbital satellite is a slightly more complex process, and the skimpy Quick Start guide supplied with the EyeTV 310 doesn’t provide very much help here.

It turns out that there’s quite a lot of hardware floating around up there in space, so in order to pick up satellite broadcasts you first need to enter the name and orbital position of a specific satellite into the EyeTV software. By default, the EyeTV software locked onto the European Astra satellite at 19.20 East. We had to explore the program’s menu options before we discovered a more extensive list of satellites that we could choose from.

Elgato EyeTV 310

First, find your satellite...

However, this list merely provides the names of the various satellites and doesn’t give any indication of the channels broadcast from them. So we then had to root around on the Freesat website before we found the information we needed, which is that Freesat is broadcast through the Astra 2 satellite at 28.20 East, and the delightfully-named Eurobird at 28.50 East.

Satellite TV buffs will know all this, of course, but first-time users who aren’t familiar with the details of satellite broadcasting systems could easily get lost here, so Elgato could perhaps provide a bit more information about some of the more important satellite services, such as Freesat.

Once we had specified the correct satellite it took the EyeTV software another 20 minutes or so to tune into the full selection of channels – but that’s because there are more than 1000 TV channels and radio stations broadcast from the Astra 2 satellite. Unfortunately, many of the best channels are encrypted pay-TV channels broadcast by Sky – which also uses the Astra 2 satellite – and only available to Sky subscribers. The EyeTV 310 does have a CI (Common Interface) slot that allows you to insert pre-paid cards that provide access to certain pay-TV services, but that’s not a particularly attractive option given the already high cost of the device.

To make things a bit simpler here, the EyeTV software does have a useful option that lets you hide pay-TV channels from view, so that you can just focus on the free channels that are available. It wasn’t long before we were sampling the delights of the equestrian Horse & Country, the Body In Balance yoga channel and The Dating Channel - purely in the interests of research, of course.

Elgato EyeTV 310

Watch BBC HD in all its glory... and gameshows for kids

Admittedly, there aren’t many exciting channels currently available on Freesat that you can’t also get from the terrestrial Freeview system - and a much cheaper Freeview TV tuner - but there is one particular channel that we were very keen to get a look at.

The BBC’s solitary HD channel is broadcast free of charge over Freesat, and we were dying to take a look at some HD content on our widescreen iMac. The image quality really is impressive and definitely left us wanting to see more. We were pleased to see that HD recording and playback was nice and smooth, even on a relatively modest Mac equipped with a mere 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo processor. It was also interesting to compare the sizes of the standard- and high-definition video files that we recorded during our tests. EyeTV captures satellite broadcasts in their original MPEG 2 format, which produced file sizes of around 35MB per minute - approximately 2GB per hour - for standard definition recordings, while HD programmes recorded off BBC HD came to almost 150MB per minute (9GB per hour).

With apologies to Jaws, we're going to need a bigger hard drive.

Elgato EyeTV 310

Supports DVB-S and DVB-S2

EyeTV also allows you to convert those MPEG 2 files into other formats, such as the more compact H.264 format used by portable devices such as the iPod and PlayStation Portable, and we were able to squash our test files down to about 20MB per minute for standard-definition recordings and 40MB per minute for HD. That will make life a bit easier for your hard disk, but the EyeTV 310 also has a second Firewire port tucked away round the back, which could come in handy for connecting an external Firewire hard disk to provide some extra storage.

We were also hoping to explore ITV HD as well, but ITV HD isn’t a conventional full-time TV channel. It's only available on specific occasions – ie. big football matches – and there weren’t any of those happening when we tested the EyeTV 310. And shame on Channel 4 for giving its HD channel only to Sky HD subscribers – we’ll remember that when you hold your hand out for a chunk of the BBC’s licence fee.

To provide a bit of additional future-proofing, the EyeTV 310 can also receive broadcasts that use the newer DVB-S2 standard. This uses the more efficient H.264 compression to squeeze HD broadcasts down to the same size as standard-definition MPEG 2 broadcasts, and which should lead to a wider range of HD channels becoming available in the future.

We questioned Elgato about the cost of the EyeTV 310, and it explained that, unlike conventional TV tuners, which can be mass-produced cheaply, the EyeTV 310 uses custom chips and components and is only produced in small quantities.

And since Humax's promised Freesat HD capable DVR is set to retail for around £299, perhaps the EyeTV 310 isn't so badly priced.

Either way, it’s certainly given us a taste for HD TV and we can’t wait for the laggards at Ofcom and Freeview to get their act together and provide free HD channels for everyone.

Verdict

It’s a shame that the EyeTV 310 is so expensive, as we had a great time exploring the selection of channels that we could pick up on it. The chance to glimpse BBC HD at long last was also welcome. If you're keen to see and record BBC HD on your Mac, this is the box to go for.

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