Product Reviews

The convergence of the Mac and home entertainment appliances has been a painfully slow process, despite Apple's claims that it could be the hub of your digital life. However, these two products from El Gato have the potential to seal the union.

EyeTV 400 is a digital terrestrial (DVB-T) version of the company's range of TV tuners. It connects to your Mac using a FireWire cable and can receive and decode all the free-to-air digital television channels. In a nutshell, it's a Freeview box for your Mac. It ships with its own set-top antenna and TV-style remote control. The software allows you to view digital TV on your Mac, record manually or schedule recordings, and view, edit and burn recorded programmes to DVD or CD. The icing on the cake is a link-up with the TVTV online scheduling service. As well as checking what's on and when, a trial subscription included with EyeTV allows you to create recording schedules online and pass them to EyeTV.

EyeHome is an identical silver box but has a very different function. It connects to an Ethernet network and to a TV using either a SCART cable or composite audio and video. There's also an optical socket for passing digital audio to a pre-amplifier or home cinema receiver. Once connected, and with the server software running on your Mac, you can use the remote control to navigate the menu system displayed on your TV screen. This allows you to select from iTunes' playlists, iPhoto albums, movies stored in the Movies folder in your User account on your Mac, and a selection of online content such as Internet radio stations. You can also view content recorded with EyeTV.

Both products appear simple to set up, yet both caused us problems. We had to run through the installation and set-up procedure for EyeTV several times before it worked. But once up and running, we were very impressed. Even with only the set-top antenna connected we could receive most channels on offer. The MPEG-2 content distrubuted by DVB-T is reproduced losslessly on the Mac's screen, meaning that watching TV is akin it watching a DVD on the Mac.

The EyeTV software is well thought-out and the interface is easy to get to grips with. Changing channels can be done from your Mac's keyboard or using the EyeTV

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remote control. Recorded programmes show up in a window on-screen and can be viewed or edited from there. And setting up recording schedules online is easy.

We had less trouble getting EyeHome to work. However, one quirk confused us. The green LED that glows on the front of the box when plugged in doesn't, as we assumed, mean that the device is switched on and ready for action. It indicates that EyeHome is in standby mode. Switching it on using the remote control turns the LED off, leaving no indication that the box is on and working.

With that out of the way were able to connect the EyeHome to both our network and a TV and get it working. EyeHome uses Rendevouz to detect Macs on the network and its opening screen allows you to choose which Mac to connect to. Once connected, you can use your TV or home cinema system to view photographs, movies and recorded TV programmes, and listen to music stored on your Mac. However, there are a number of caveats. You can only view photographs organised in iPhoto. Other photos on your Mac are invisible to EyeHome. And while you can view iPhoto albums as a slideshow, you can't use the remote to manually move from one to the other. Its a similar story with music. In order to listen to your tunes using EyeHome, they must be stored in iTunes playlists. The Movies option allows you to navigate to any movie stored in your Users/Movie folder. However, whether or not you can view it depends on the codec used to create the movie file. Crucially, EyeHome doesn't recognise .mov files output from QuickTime or iMovie. However, it will play MPEG-1 and DivX avi files, and it's relatively easy to encode these using QuickTime Pro.

The glaring omission from EyeHome is wireless connectivity. You can buy a Wi-Fi to Ethernet bridge or and use this to hook up to a wireless network, but it adds an extra £60 or so to the cost. Built-in 802.11 support is essential in a product like this as very few people have Ethernet networks at home and fewer still have a socket located conveniently close to the TV.

Both EyeTV and EyeHome are excellent examples of the potential of technology to integrate your Mac with a home entertainment set-up. And El Gato deserves praise for being among the first to come to market with such products. However, both have their flaws. The difficulty in setting up EyeTV is not helped by inadequate documentation. And EyeHome's limitations on the content you can view, particularly the lack of support for .mov files, and the lack of wireless connectivity will be major flaws for many.

EyeTV earns a recommendation, despite being more expensive than we would like, for giving you the ability to turn your Mac into a digital video recorder, but for EyeHome, despite its clever use of technology, improvements need to be made before we can unreservedly recommend it.