TV capture devices. Part 1
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on October 4, 2007 at 10:39 am
“What a bunch of jobsworths!”, my partner said after she was asked to brighten up someone’s tedious presentation with cartoons. “If it’s that boring, what’s the point of presenting it in the first place?”, she grumbled into her monitor.
“Look on the bright side”, I said in self-preservation, “You don’t have to go to it”.
“But that’s the point, I might have to.”
Shoot to kill
As I recall from 18 years ago, the last time I was an employee, meetings were always a good excuse for a doodling session. Unless it was after lunch when eyelids weigh a ton. Thank goodness Powerpoint hadn’t been invented then. I bet more time is wasted creating the presentations than gained by giving them. Whoever invented bullet points needs shooting.
Nowadays, we can be asked to create presentation with an increasing amount of multi-media elements. These are usually for playback on a variety of laptops running umpteen different flavours of Windows. If they were Macs it would be no problem because QuickTime would be the solution but with Windows we never know what the presentation will look like. If we can, we use an Acrobat PDF because we know they will be fine and can incorporate all the various mixed media, embedded fonts, zany effects and the software is freely available.
Elgato and Miglia’s finest
Lately, segments of films and TV programs can be part of a display and with this in mind I put together a head to head of the greatest and best from Elgato and Miglia. Three boxes arrived to match up with my existing EyeTV 410. One by one they were installed onto my MacBook and without exception I ran into difficulties with them all. Without going into details and telling tales (at this point) many hours were spent grovelling into the dusty areas under our desks. Aerials were re-cabled, not a pleasant job because RF leads and plugs must surely be the last hangover from an age when digital meant counting the fingers on one hand. Software was installed, updated and uninstalled, even to the point of delving into the innermost reaches of the operating system to dig out little hangers-on of applications.
One of the devices refused to work at all and only by reading the logos on its box did I learn it is for analogue signals only. I fact, all the problems stemmed from the output of our digital aerial. It has never caused a problem with our old EyeTV USB box or our EyeTV 410 which shows a signal quality of 100% and strength of 98.8% but the newer TV capture devices appear to demand much stronger magic to flow down the wires.
All at sea
Where we live, the TV transmitter is in line of sight about 10 miles away. The problem being it is across the sea and this apparently adds all manner of wobbly bits to the TV signal so that analogue reception is almost unwatchable even though digital is perfectly clear. Our ordinary TV’s work fine either through their own digital receivers or a Freeview set top box.
The head to head will take place this weekend at the same time as watching Lewis Hamilton on one or other of the TV capture devices. I already know which my favourite is so it will be interesting to see which device “wins”.
To be continued…
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