Recording TV to Macbook Pro

I've searched many of the posting on this forum regarding recording TV from digital cable on my Macbook Pro and really didn't see anything that really answers this question.

Did some research on the web and was looking at the ATI TV Wonder HD 650. Appears that this would do the job.

Does anyone have any experience with either this particular product or something similar?

Thanks in advance for your input/feedback!

The ATI is a windows only device and will not work with OS X.

The highest regarded device on the Mac side are the ElGato products.

Pinnacle also makes one or two TV tuners that will work.

bobtomay said:

The ATI is a windows only device and will not work with OS X.

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The OP may have been thinking of this ATI product.

I have an Elgato Hybrid and it works fine, usually. Last week it or something crashed my tower.

xstep said:

The OP may have been thinking of this ATI product.

I have an Elgato Hybrid and it works fine, usually. Last week it or something crashed my tower.

Click to expand...

Thanks xstep. Went looking at ATI's site and didn't find that one for the Mac.

Since I didn't know it existed don't know anything about it. Can tell you that I have used ATI TV tuner cards as DVR's and to record TV since '98 on my Win machines. Still have a AIW 9800 Pro and a HD Wonder (supposedly, the last one that doesn't recognize broadcast flags) sitting around. Was a big fan of ATI cards (except for their notorious video driver issues) for many years. Not everyone will agree, but I had great success with all of their tuner cards I used. If they've brought all their years of experience to bear for this Mac version it should be pretty good.

ElGato may have a leg up on them however, since they've been doing this for considerably longer for the Mac. Some of the new media center and quite few other apps coming out for the Mac have some support for the the EyeTV devices. ElGato has a decent user forum and is so heavily entrenched, that it's usually not too hard to get a little help on most Mac forums for it. You may be kind of on your own with the ATI.

I'd like to see some feedback from regular users on this new ATI device also. Been out for a year now. Should have some users around.

I also use Elgato, but I use the 250 and I really like it and the software EyeTV is getting better every year, quite easy to use and with a nice feature set. The only problem Im going to have with it in the near future is that starting 2010 you will have to purchase a TV Guide subscription to get program data, unless you can find a fee feed somewhere.

Thanks for all your input!!!

I checked out the ElGato site and was amazed! That's what I was looking for.

Still have one more question....Don't want to appear stupid...BUT....after recording to the HD of your MAC..can you then burn a CD/DVD so that it can be played on any conventional DVD player???

THANKS!

Converting the input to DVD requires converting the file for use within iDVD. The Elgato software makes it easy to remove the ads too.

I bought toast to go along with EyeTV, and EyeTV has a little button you can click that sends the file to toast automatically. Toast is not cheap though, so you might want to look into sending the file to iDVD. I believe if you right click on the EyeTV file in the finder, and view contents, you'll find a mpeg file in there which you can use in iDVD.. I think. And if you're going to edit out the commercials you should do that within EyeTV since their editing controls are really really easy to use.