> From: Shay Telfer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Has anyone out there with an EyeTV shelled out for the upgrade to the > EyeTV 2 software? Is it any good?
Yep, I purchased it yesterday and have been using it fairly extensively since then to queue up a lot of compression tasks squishing dozens of Quantum episodes and other docos that have been sitting cluttering up my EyeTV recordings list. Probably the most important advancement for me is the new behaviour when batch compressing lots of recordings. Instead of EyeTV trying to compress them all at the same time and ending up bogging down and being no use to anyone, version 2 queues the jobs and only works on the one recording at a time. The new "compress to iPod" option is a checkbox in the "schedule a recording" dialog so it compresses to the iPod format automatically as soon as the recording is finished. Great time-saver that. Also, the default iPod setting in EyeTV is actually 640x360 resolution (using plain MPEG-4) which is more than viewable on the Mac screen (and data projector) particularly for docos and news etc. However, for movies, I am still using H264 and the original resolution (usually around 720x360 or so) for the best quality. A v1.84 bug which defaulted the resolution incorrectly to 720x576 when compressing to H264 that added several extra steps for me is fixed as well (hurrah!). It also optionally adds the recordings to iTunes ready for synchronisation to your video iPod. IceTV is now totally integrated into EyeTV (no need to use iSlayer's Dashboard widget) for one-click scheduling of recordings, it doesn't pick up any channels in the EPG when I try it out on the 14-day IceTV trial so I can't say if it is any good (beyond the 14-day trial, I still refuse to spend $150 per year just to save a few clicks when scheduling recordings. $50 per year maybe!) The new iTunes-like interface is a big advance over the old, particularly separating schedules from recordings and giving more info (including size of files) for each recording and now allowing multiple selections and other Mac-like options for working with recordings and schedules etc. One annoyance is inactive schedules are now intermingled with active ones making it harder to see at a glance what's what. The new "Show in Finder" option for recordings is very handy as is the new intelligent naming of recordings (no more 00000000097d56.mpg). yay All-in-all, though at US$49 it is a somewhat expensive upgrade (still cheaper than a year's subscription to IceTV though), it has more than paid for itself in the amount of hassle it has saved me getting rid of the non-standard Mac interface of the old software and adding the various new features. YMMV -Mart
