If you like to consume your media in various destinations, take for instance your iPod, AppleTV, Macbook, you’ll know that there are very few solutions to getting television programming onto them. You could buy every episode on iTunes for almost $2 apiece, you could obtain it illegally, or now you can receive television signal through your mac – and record straight to your hard drive and iTunes library.
Elgato has a whole slew of physical TV tuners for your mac, and a killer software app called eyeTV. Elgato’s tuners will take your cable, satellite or regular television tuner, and transmit them into your mac. When you buy a physical tuner, you get a remote and the eyeTV software. Then, using the eyeTV app, you can watch, record, edit, and export your favorite TV shows. If you’ve ever used TiVo, or any DVR for that matter, you will be familiar with the way eyeTV works. It uses TitanTV to download the programming guide, and then allows you to schedule recordings, exports and more. You can work with live television playing off to the side, or even use your mac as a full featured television. One of the nice things about eyeTV is that you can schedule recordings, and set them to auto export into either iPod or AppleTV formats  you can even have them sent to your MobileMe iDisk – for viewing on the iPhone or iPod touch.

The only problem that I have experienced has to do with using DirecTV. EyeTV can recognize the DirecTV, and I can view liveTV great, I just can’t change the channel using eyeTV. Instead, I have to use the DirecTV remote and use the DirecTV box. You might ask why this is a problem, and it really isn’t until it comes time to record. Now, eyeTV will auto-change the channel in order to record the program you say to. If eyeTV can’t change the channel – it will not record what you want. However, a guy by the name of Tom, has cooked up a solution. He runs cooldvr.com – and set up a cable system and software solution to fix the problem. I haven’t personally tried it yet, but we’ve exchanged emails, and I’ve put in my order!

You can read and see more on elgato’s products on their website.