[Will Brocklebank]

I don't know if anyone else finds this but I wanted to throw out a couple of small issues that really hamper my enjoyment of the otherwise excellent EyeTV...

1. The unit should NOT be allowed to change channels for a new recording without first putting up a warning - if you have paused a programme and are watching say 10mins behind time EyeTV will suddenly jump to realtime to record the next programme. Now say that the programme you were watching (which was important enough to you to pause for something) is far more important than the one you had scheduled to record as a 'nice to have'. But you lose the end without warning as you jump to real time. PLEASE LET IT WARN US! We should be able to choose again whether to record and destroy what we are currently watching.

2. If you have a limited amount of HD space on the machine running EyeTV you may want to use some firewire or NAS device to store programming. However, at least over my wired Cat5e 100Mbs network if you record and playback from a NAS device you get a judder every two seconds or so as the RAM recording writes to the NAS device. This is not good enough as the PVR capability fails even in these optiumum conditions (you just know some people are going to expect this sort of behaviour over wireless which would be a different story).

3. As a possible solution to (2) maybe they could allow 2 or more locations for EyeTV recordings so that when specified in the Preferences you could see them aggregated as one list in the recordings section of the EyeTV guide but then you could write new info to the on-board HD and (possibly have this automated) when it got down to a minimum amount of HD space left the oldest would be "archived" to the NAS device.

Anyway - having tested Sky+, Windows MCE 2005 and now EyeTV on a dedicated Mac Mini (Core Duo 1.83Ghz) my wife thinks this set-up the worst. She is wrong - MCE was far worse but there is still a long way to go suntil we have a Mac based solution that really does the business.

Anyone have any solutions/similar experiences?

Cheers.

[JKT]

I don't have any issues using an external firewire drive for my recordings (that is, no stutter), fwiw, but I would agree with your points and no.3 would be a nice touch.

My annoyances are:

1. You can't secure your Mac and use EyeTV at the same time - if you have a password activated screen saver, EyeTV will fail to keep the Mac active when it wakes the machine to record something in your absence (though this is more an OS issue which Elgato can't work around), so you have to leave your Mac completely open and unprotected.

Prior to 2.3.3 (or was it 2.3.2) at least you could use EyeTV under a different user account via FUS (so I would log into a dedicated "EyeTV account" when at work or away for the weekend) but this is now broken and was supposedly not an intended feature anyway.

2. There is no way to concatenate two recordings together - e.g. ITV here in the UK has an incredibly annoying habit of sticking a half hour news programme in the middle of a film in the evening so you have to record it in two parts. I'd like to be able to join the two parts together into one recording.

3. There is no way to record only a part of a programme when you are away from the machine (e.g. say I want to record a film on a different channel that starts half way through Match of the Day but I'd still like to be able to record the portion of MotD that is showing up until the film starts).

4. When you export to iPod, all the content is automatically put under the "TV shows" heading in iTunes when 100% of what I export is films and should therefore go into "Movies"

5. The display of the programme guide should be zoomable - I would like to squeeze the content so that e.g. half a day fits in the window instead of just a couple of hours so I can get a clearer picture of the schedules without having to scroll left and right all the time.

6. When you are viewing a different day in the schedules and switch to e.g. viewing one of your folders of shows, switching back to the schedule again should restore the state that you were previously viewing rather than reverting back to the schedule as it is now.

[mduell]

I'd go the other way on #1... it should automatically switch channels and start recording the scheduled program when it starts, but you shouldn't lose your buffer. That's just fragile design.

[Uncle Skeleton]

When you're watching a recording with a delay, and the recording ends, it should not switch itself back to the live feed on that channel. That's just stupid.

[JKT]

Good point Uncle Skeleton - that one annoys me too.

Another three:

You can't pause a recording (e.g. if you are watching what you are recording live, you should be able to stop the recording during ad breaks and have it pick up again when you restart in a single file, so you don't have to waste time editing at the end).

You should be able to sort the order of files in your folders independently of the Recordings (so e.g. you can sort by title in a folder and still maintain the sort by date in the recordings).

When you set up a repeat recording (e.g. weekly) the schedule should indicate the scheduled recordings subsequent to the first in the series. Currently, there is no indication at all in the Programme guide that anything other than the first in the series will be recorded.