Product Reviews

Is the Mac a media centre or isn't it? Apple's Front Row provides an answer to one half of the puzzle, but what about TV and other external video sources? Miglia's TVMax, a box designed in the Mac mini style, aims to deal with this other half of the puzzle.

If you have a Mac mini, the TVMax will stack very neatly with it, but the low-slung silver box looks good teamed with any Mac model or as the only thing (aside from the display) that's on view. The software part of the equation is dealt with by the excellent EyeTV software. This handles the input from the TVMax for displaying in a window (or full screen) on your monitor and it also gives you the ability to pause what you're watching for a short while. This is done by spooling the live input into a cache and then simultaneously reading from the cache when you start playing again. This is ideal if you're watching and the phone goes, but you wouldn't want to use it while you're in the middle of a PlayStation game. EyeTV also lets you interact directly with the TVMax to change TV channels and switch the inputs. There's a standard TV antenna socket, an S-Video port and a set of composite sockets for phono, audio and video hook-ups.

We attached an indoor TV antenna to start with and the automatic channel tuning did its job very quickly. Channel 5 was a little fuzzy, but no worse than a regular TV. When we used a lead to the external antenna this cleared up nicely, and the TVMax's remote control meant we could channel-surf while kicking back on the sofa, just like a regular TV. As this was a Mac meant for regular use as well,

ADVERTISEMENT

switching from full-screen TV display to the variable-sized window kept us gently distracted by the Simpsons (and the news) while we worked.

We then tried connecting a couple of game consoles using the composite phono connectors. This all worked as well as you could wish for and The S-Video port was handy for hooking up an old camcorder to capture the footage on disk for later use. This brings us to one of the big deals about the TVMax: its hardware Mpeg video encoding. This means your Mac isn't asked to do anything more arduous than deal with the ready-compressed digital video content; it doesn't have to compress it on the fly as well. This isn't so much of a big thing with today's fast Macs but it is still a big point in its favour.

While we're looking at this product's abilities it is also worth noting what it lacks: namely, any form of digital input. This isn't so much of an issue for digital camcorders, as your Mac is already well equipped for that. It is the absence of any direct digital TV tuner support which might give some people pause for thought. This is a strange ommission and counters the usefulness of being able to import analogue video. And of course the trouble is that, as we're supposed to be preparing for the great analogue switch-off in 2009, this aspect of the TVMax does feel a little retrograde. You can hook up any digital receiver that outputs an analogue signal to one of the TVMax's inputs, but then you don't get control over selecting TV programmes or any of the clever scheduling tricks that EyeTV can do in conjunction with the TVMax's internal receiver.

Still, what the TVMax does, it does very well. Pausing live TV, recording anything straight to disk and letting you edit out the adverts or bloopers later, putting console games of all kinds onto your Mac screen, recording shows automatically so you can watch them later and so on - it all works very well and is very easy to use. Whether the absence of a digital receiver is a big problem is your decision. For the price we'd have liked to see that included, but it does perform admirably - and if you have boxes of VHS and H.8 tapes that need digitising it could be just the job.