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Recording TV with my iMac

G

GaryJ73167

Guest
Before asking my tv recording question, here is what i am using:

iMac 17" Core Duo intel 1.8ghz 1 Gig RAM With a Cable modem

My goal:

to record tv shows (Scheduled) during the night on my imac, and, when i wake up in the morning, just copy the shows that i recorded to my jump drive or hard drive and take them to work with me.

I dont have much time in the morning, so, i want to make sure that there is no encoding needed. I want to just be able to wake up, get the TV shows that i recorded, and copy them straight over to my data storage.

Am I looking at the right thing?

http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyetvhybridna

And, one more thing. If I buy this, does this come with everything I need? I would hate to open the package, only to find out that there were other things I should have purchased with it.

the source that i am going to be recording from is Coaxial Cable. I am just going to run a splitter off my cable modem and hook the coaxial to this unit.

One final question (I promise). Do these devices deliver good quality? I mean, I know I am only going to be able to get the quality that the coaxial cable will deliver, but, will this device preserve it at least?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Gary
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2.16 GHz Intel Imac Core 2 Duo//MacBook 1.83 Core 2 Duo//G5 Power Mac
I have not tried a tvcard with my mac however I am sure it works as well if not better then the wintv cards do on a pc. I believe that you just connect your cable to the card and then set the software to record what you want. As far as quality, once again on the wintv card you can set the quality of the recording the better the quality the larger the file. Depending on what you want to watch you may need a fairly large jump drive.
 
OP
G

GaryJ73167

Guest
Reel1, thanks for your quick reply. I now have a 2gig jump drive, so, i am thinking (hoping) that it will belarge enough to do what i want with it.

I bought some winTV cards for my windows machines in the past, but, was never happy with the quality of the recording. i was never expecting it to be better than the TV signal i was recording, but, at least be the same.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
20" iMac C2D 2.16ghz, 13" MacBook 2.0ghz, 60gb iPod vid, 1gb nano
el gato makes excellent products, and you can customize the quality greatly. If you are worried about size there is also an option when you are scheduling to have it convert for iPod after it is finished (I have never used it since I edit out my commercials before converting, but since you are just popping them on a drive to take with you, that shouldn't be a problem). Video Quality is excellent, scheduling is simple, and you won't need to worry about encoding anything when you wake up in the morning
 
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MacBook Pro 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo 4GB RAM OS 10.5.2
I have the El Gato's 250 which is awesome and I chose it over the hybrid since it does the processing itself instead of putting the weight on the computers processor. It's quite a smooth little system :)
 

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