CYTV and EyeTV 3, the perfect partnership.

Coinciding with Elgato’s announcement of EyeTV3, Andreas Junghans of Lucid-cake has a new version of CYTV. While CYTV is still an early alpha version that didn’t stop me testing them both.

This isn’t meant to be a review of either of the programs, just a taster. There are many reviews of EyeTV3 already on line such as: here, and here but none for the new CYTV, so you read it here first.

CYTV does what EYETV cannot
CYTV is designed to work in conjunction with EyeTV and VLC to act as a server/client for streaming TV and recordings. An excellent review of the earlier version of CYTV is here. The arrival of Leopard broke that version of CYTV and a new one is currently underway. At this point it has a few bugs and the interface is at an early stage. Nevertheless, despite being written from the ground up and even as an early alpha version, CYTV can do something that EyeTV 3 can’t which is streaming live TV.

Instead of the two separate applications as before (CYTV client and server) the new version has only one zero-configuration server, plus an internet browser plug-in for VLC. Connecting to the server via web browser is easy by using the Bonjour option (see below) in Safari or entering the URL of the server Mac. This brings up a screen showing the list of EyeTV recordings and live TV options (still being developed). Once started the live link showed no tendency to get audio and video out of synch as could happen with earlier versions. Double-clicking on the live window switches between full-screen and the controller window (above).

Andreas says that the new version will be far less demanding on both the server and the client computers (it is cross platform) and welcomes input in the development of the software. See forum here for latest alpha and discussions.

EyeTV 3, black and blobby
There are some software publishers who make you wonder whether they are trying to get their entire gross profit from your purchase of their regular upgrades. Often, little seems to have changed for the better and sometimes a lot for the worse. Office 2007/8 and Adobe CS3 being cases in point.

With EyeTV 3 this is definitely not so and the latest version is well worth the modest upgrade fee. There are many new features, starting with a revised look to the icons and a new look for windows and controls. Elgato has gone for a black and blobby theme reminiscent of Mac OS X version 10.0. It’s a question of personal taste whether this is an improvement or not. The little on-screen zapper is still there but many of its functions are available straight from the player window (below).

Most of the existing features from EyeTV2 have had a tweak, with a greatly improved guide search, automatic recording of TV series, automatic episode management and the ability to save channel listings (meaning no more retuning between home and the office). But some features are new or greatly enhanced.

Smart playlists, coupled with smart guides and smart recording, bring similar features found in iTunes and iPhoto. You can search up to 20 fields (below) which include actor’s names, director and year, duration and whether it is HDTV or not. From this intelligent search function, smart playlists and guides are created.

Sharing is good
From our point of view, the best new feature is the enhanced sharing where your archive of recordings can now be shared with other EyeTV3 users on a local network. This works in much the same way as sharing iPhoto or iTunes libraries. Shared libraries (below) show in the sidebar where they can be browsed and played as if they were actually on the Mac.

Practically, this works faster than simply pointing the client’s EyeTV at the server’s archive, something we tried with EyeTV2 and found it stuttered too much to be watchable. We were able to connect a MacBook to a 32″ LCD TV and watch shared EyeTV recordings in full-screen, excellent quality over an 802.11g network. The playback is controlled by the little zapper Apple supply with Macs which is able to fast-forward through ads as if the recordings are actually on the MacBook. Even more impressive, the G5 2×2Gz server was concurrently recording another program in EyeTV as well as compressing a different recording in its library, collecting Mail and other housekeeping. And its fans didn’t even rise above tick-over speed.

Watch out Apple TV
Editing recordings is still done via the main viewer window by placing start and end markers at sections to be deleted (below). This is fast and simple to do, especially as there are usually two black “holes” at the beginning and end of advertisements which makes marking them easy.

EyeTV3 is rapidly becoming better than an Apple TV box and considerably cheaper too. Its abilities as an all-purpose video library have yet to be explored by Elgato but I bet they have some ideas on that. EyeTV recordings are only packages with the mp4 file and a few extras inside and as they can be converted for exporting to other formats. EyeTV should be able to do the reverse direction to import recordings into EyeTV, possibly using Turbo.264 to speed things up.