By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Video capture, Apple on January 26, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Elgato’s new EyeTV update released last week is ideal for any foodie. We caught Jamie Oliver’s programme on wild mushrooms, where he and Gennaro Contaldo scout around a forest, finding ceps and chicken of the woods. Gennaro gave Jamie some useful identification tips along with beautiful close ups of the fungi. If only we had set EyeTV to record it because we get a lot of mushrooms in our wooded garden.
Unfortunately, this was not a programme running on Channel 4 otherwise we could have jumped to Channel 4 +1 to record its re-airing 60 minutes later. It was on More 4 instead. Why are there so many +1 channels, anyway? Along with the shopping channels it seems such a waste of the restricted digital bandwidth.
We aren’t usually great lovers of Jamie and prefer to travel down the Canal du Midi with Rick Stein but one has to respect Jamie’s achievements and not without a lot of effort on his part. An old friend of ours who has often been the sound engineer on Jamie’s broadcasts told us of the struggles Jamie has to include people who would have normally been written off. At 15 for example, his restaurant training scheme, some of the kids pushed boundaries well past breaking point but Jamie stuck with them.
Smart Guides
Just to make certain we won’t miss any more of his programmes we used the new Smart Series Guides to automatically identify and record Jamie’s shows. This was easy to set up by simply typing ‘Jamie Oliver’ in the EyeTV 3.1 search window, then clicking the Record All button.
As more of his shows are added to the tvtv or TV Guide EPGs, EyeTV will pick them out and make a schedule to record them. We’ve also set it to make a down-sampled version of the recording for our iPods, immediately after the programme ends. Although this is with Elgato’s Turbo.264, we find it is now slower than the Mac Pro’s quad cores, it’s just that old habits die hard.
Not so smart EPGs
Along with pin-protected parental controls the other new feature of EyeTV 3.1 is its custom search criteria for programme genres. This uses the information in the tvtv and TV Guide EPGs to list all the forthcoming programmes of a similar type. The results can be a little hit and miss because of the EPG’s classification. Searching for war films, for example, produced a list of 35 films due to be aired over the next two weeks and included such films as Sleepy Hollow, a 1950s swashbuckler film and a movie about a zebra with a talent for racing.
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