EvolutionTV (PAL/NTSC)
reviewed by Robert Pritchett
Miglia Technology, LTD United Kingdom Product site: http://www.miglia.com/products/video/evolutiontv/index.html Released: March 1, 2005. $279 USD, £149 GBP, €209 Euro, (all prices are ex VAT) Requirements: Mac G4 or later; Mac OS X 10.3 or later; USB 2.0 port; 256MB RAM; lots of storage space for recording. Comes with; EvolutionTV DVR; Infrared Remote (requires two AAA batteries, not included); Coax cable adapter for TV input; wall-wart for power; CD-ROM (no EyeTV software) with PDF user guide; USB cable; 2-year Warranty card. Strengths: Recording, recording and recording.
Troubleshooting FAQs: http://www.miglia.com/Support/evolutiontv_tbst.html Other Reviews: http://www.macworld.com/2005/12/reviews/evolutiontv/index.php/?lsrc=mwrevrss http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/6276/ http://www.schwarztech.us/reviews/migliaevolutiontv.shtml http://www.mymug.org/resources/rev_evotv.htm Plug-ins: iChat Patch - http://www.miglia.com/Support/evolutiontv.html Tested with Version 2.6 beta of the Evolution TV software on an iMac G5 running Mac OS X 10.4.3 Tiger. |
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Miglia Technology offers the EvolutionTV (EvoTV) as the Digital Video Recorder (DVR) being initially sold in the Untied Kingdom and France and the rest of Europe. Recently I was allowed to review it for US consumption. My review has been colored by experiencing the Plextor ConvertX unit reviewed back in November 2005 in macCompanion.
Part of my challenge was our local cable company. While in the middle of testing, the local cable network went through no less than three separate day and night-long outages that seemed to coincide with each effort to review the product over a two-week period during extreme cold weather. Coincidence? Apparently. No, hooking up this device on the cable network did not cause the regional and citywide unplanned maintenance outages. But it really was uncanny that each time it seemed I tried to use it, the network would go down, but not always. Between down times, I was able to record with no problem, but real-time video streaming as a TV on my iMac G5 would show the channel and run for a couple of seconds before freezing the frame while allowing the audio to continue. The Miglia technical team contacted me and let me know that Miglia defaults to MPEG-2 and not MPEG-4. I kept sending them zip files of my log and they kept making suggestions. I felt I was working with a beta product. And perhaps I have been. I set compression to MPEG-4, so the recorded media could be viewed in QuickTime Pro. The default recordings in MPEG-2 format were not recognized.
The free VLC media player that came with the CD is a made-in-France product by the VideoLAN team at http://www.videolan.org/ and may go away due to recent French Legislation making such software “illegal”.
The CD I received was a recent burn of version 2.5.2 of EvoTV for use with Mac OS X. I’ve never had to deal with MPEG-2 and I was told that Apple sells it separately and it is not included in QuickTime Pro. Frankly, I thought that was not a solution I wanted to deal with.
Finally, after removing a few other files from my machine and doing other software installations unrelated to Miglia, the EvolutionTV inexplicably began working as advertised. I was amazed! Since then, I have been using version 2.6 of EvoTV and it seems to be a little more stable.
I was asked to remove EyeTV, because when the EvolutionTV app would begin, EyeTV wanted to perform. However, removing it made no difference to performance of the EvolutionTV unit. EyeTV does have the EvolutionTV as a DVR option; however, to use it requires a proprietary copy and registration number, which I was not given. I would suggest strongly that if you want to use this unit in the US, get a copy of EyeTV designed to work with the unit. Why? Because there are controls like Closed Captions that can be accessed, but not currently with the EvolutionTV-only software. EyeTV software for this unit costs another $80 USD and based on my experience, I’d recommend it in a heartbeat.
Since my Mac doesn’t have S-Video, or composite ports, I could only test using the TV Tuner port, which is essentially the USB port. That’s right, USB instead of FireWire. And the quality difference of throughput between the Plextor ConvertX unit and this one is noticable. FireWire throughput video quality is better. The USB 2.0 Port lag in response is noticeable as the Miglia software initializes and offers striated viewing before stabilizing. This may require some toggling between turning the TV Window on and off to get a good signal.
The Miglia techs seem to be more familiar with VLC than they are with QuickTime and kept trying to get me to use it so the MPEG-2 recordings could be seen using VLC instead of using QuickTime Pro. I wanted it to work with what I had. Who really captures TV programming to DVD? Isn’t that just begging for anti-pirate legislative activity? I wasn’t going to go spend more money for MPEG-2 functionality from Apple anyway. Hey, I have iMovie 5 and with MPEG-4 can use that instead.
The EvolutionTV software has a memory buffer, so even
while watching in TV-mode, we can go back or forward using the controller. It’s
called TimeShift.
By the way, I used the on-screen controller instead of the remote analog tuner that required two AAA batteries instead of AA batteries and works with the infrared reader on the EvolutionTV unit.
The physical tuner can support up to 125 channels. The
Euro version supports PAL and SECAM (720x576) while the US version supports
NTSC and PAL (720x480). Both
handle the PAL/SECAM/NTSC video capture through the composite and S-video
ports.
Audio is encoded in either AAC or MP3. Video is recorded in MPG. Files can also be recorded as DivX or AVI files.
Preferences have three areas; general, video input and
plug-ins.
Access to the compression menu and audio and tuner menus are reached from here.
Website TV guide functionality comes from TitanTV here in the US and recording function can be scheduled out to two weeks into the future with plug-ins. For the Euro TV-types, tvtv integration can do up to 3 weeks of programming and apparently is more advanced than the TitanTV functionality in the US.
But with cross-platform DVR units competing against each other, I wonder what Apple has in store that might bypass DVR external units all together. After all, they moved the iSight technology inside the iMac G5, didn’t’ they?
