TvTuners
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Elgato EyeTV Mobile eyes-on (video)
Elgato's been experimenting with live TV on the iPad for over a year now, but until now, that meant streaming programs that were already broadcast online anyway -- a mighty large limitation, wouldn't you say? This week, though, the company announced EyeTV Mobile, a TV tuner that plugs into the iPad 2's 30-pin connector, allowing it to pull in broadcast television. We just happened to stumble on Elgato's booth here at IFA and treated ourselves to a short TV break. The tuner, which fits easily in the palm of your hand when the antenna is collapsed, only allows you to draw in signals using the DVB-T standard, so make no mistake this is a product just for our European readers. (Although Elgato says it hopes to release something similar in Japan.) Even more than the hardware or the programming selection (fútbol, anyone?), we remain impressed by the free EyeTV iOS app, whose interface is pretty much the same as the HDHomeRun for iPad app, with the ability to swipe the screen to change channels and, in this case, save your location. It'll be available across the pond for €99.95 / £99.95 at the end of this month. Until then (or if you're just stuck in the states), check out our hands-on photos below and a video demo after the break. %Gallery-132551%
Elgato EyeTV Mobile dongle brings live TV to the iPad 2
Sure, Elgato already has an app that lets you stream TV to your iPad -- but that's only if they're being broadcast online. To pull in live TV over the air you'd need a TV-tuner, something that has, until now, been unavailable for Apple's popular slate. By the end of September that lack of broadcast television will become just a distant memory with the release of EyeTV Mobile, a £100 (about $163) dongle that connects to the iPad's proprietary port. The tuner will be able to pull in MPEG 2 streams over DVB-T, but won't work with DVB-T2 broadcasts like Freeview HD. Check out the source for more details.
Hauppauge puts a fresh coat of paint on its newly-acquired PCTV tuners
It looks like it took a little longer than expected, but the sale of Avid's Pinnacle PCTV line of TV tuners to Hauppauge has finally gone through. The handoff certainly seems to be getting started on the right foot -- Hauppauge has already fired up the PCTV Systems brand as a separate entity to keep things moving nice and smoothly. The new company's webpage offers a cornucopia of tuners in USB, PCI and PCMCIA flavors, all brandishing a revamped but strangely familiar logo. The PCTV products certainly are right in line with Hauppauge's other offerings, but from the looks of things, the PCTV brand will get treated to a little more colorful and polished marketing.
Okoro's OMS-GX300 adds SLI to the HTPC
Although home theater PCs are great for watching and listening to your digital content from the comfort of your couch, most lack the graphics horsepower for playing your favorite games on your 60-inch plasma and eight speaker setup. Not so with Okoro's new OMS-GX300, which besides sporting a dual-core Athlon64 FX-60 processor from AMD, also packs in that tasty SLI goodness in the form of nVidia's GeForce 7950 GX2 card featuring a full gig of video RAM. As if that weren't enough to get you excited, the GX300 also comes with 1TB of storage standard -- upgradable to a whopping 3TB thanks to four open SATA bays -- three TV tuners (2 analog and one OTA digital), an HDA Digital X-Mystique 7.1 sound card, and just about every input and output that you could ask for -- except, curiously, HDMI. Best of all, this model features a 7-inch front panel touchscreen for displaying tons of infoswag, at a price that's at least four hundred bucks less than the $5,000-and-up screen-less Denali series from Niveus.
Blueado's m5e "Sport Edition" HTPC
If you liked the Mac mini-inspired Blueado m5e home theater PC, then you're gonna love a recently-released, improved version of the machine that the company is touting as a "Sport Edition" (because, you know, nothing invokes athleticism like sitting around watching TV and movies all day), which adds several compelling features (and $500) to its $1,500 sibling. Packing in the same 2.0GHz Pentium M processor and integrated graphics as the m5e, this new edition doubles both RAM and HDD capacity to 2GB and 400GB, respectively, and also throws in both analog and digital tuners for keeping you entertained. You get a fairly wide variety of connectivity options with this one -- USB 2.0, FireWire, DVI, VGA, S-video, and digital coax -- along with Dolby Digital and DTS support for hooking up your surround sound speakers to the included RCA outputs. Of course, no HTPC would be complete without a DVD burner, remote control, and million-in-one card reader, so the Sport Edition -- rolling into dealerships now -- mixes in those ingredients as well.
