The creature stirred again: I saw that equinux just released a software update for their TV application TheTube. They sell it together with their own Tubestick, a USB-2.0 receiver for digital terrestrial television (DTT sometimes also known as DVB-T), to bring TV shows onto a Mac. Now, since the packaging looks quite tempting and I thought that this might be a good gift for a friend of mine who just lost his DTT-PVR due to a hard-disk crash, I just had to order it for a test drive. The very low price of less than 40 Euros just reassured that it would not harm me to see it in action on my machine.
Status quo: my TV-tuner experience, the competitors, and the TubeStick
So here I am, installing the software TheTube in it’s latest version (v1.5.1) and am excited about what I will see. For years I have been using an eyetv 400 with firewire connectors and upgraded to a way smaller eyetv for DTT portable USB-stick, pretty much like the TubeStick, when the new eyetv software (2.x) was released. Later a special offer for the Formac watchandgo USB-2.0 device got me and I bought it in order to be able to record a show and watch another at the same time. Back then there were no dual-tuner devices available on the market.
The beauty and the beast
Please don’t ask me about the Formac device: I hated the software from the very beginning, it was ugly, had severe crashes that made me force-reboot my Mac frequently, and the reception seemed a lot worse than with all the Elgato devices. Formac has released a new software some months ago which is apparently optimized and has more features but I simply don’t feel like testing it anymore. Rather buying a new device than testing a new software version should give you an idea how disappointed I am by the watchandgo.
After launching TheTube and activating the software over the internet (you have five computers that can be activated, similar to iTunes activation for DRM-protected songs), I am glad to see that I get eye candy instead of eyestrain. The interface is quite beautiful and after running the channel search I get a feeling that this whole thing is worth it’s money. Everything seems to be there: TV picture, EPG (Electronic Program Guide), and a place for recordings. I will structure my article just like the interface of TheTube is separated: TV, EPG, Recordings, and settings.
The obvious: watching TV
The most important aspect of a TV-tuner is watching TV I think. TheTube makes this an easy and simple to handle task, just as it should be. You can watch in windowed mode, being able to keep an eye on the additional information about the show on the right as well as on all the shows on other channels, or you could lean back and have TheTube run in full-screen-mode giving you the maximum size of your favourite show on your screen. Changing channels with the cursor keys or your Apple Remote is great because you do not need yet another stupid remote control on your couch table. Another nice feature is the floating-window-mode which is great when you actually have to work and need an application in front but you would still like to follow how James Bond is chasing Dr. No with a glance or two every now and then. A big screen is obviously a great advantage for such a scenario. My eyetv does not support this functionality and I think I could start to like it, but then will the quality of my work really be the same?
What’s up next? Ask the EPG
The nice thing at the beginning of my test ride was that I had all things important on the screen: TV, EPG, Recordings. Now I figure that this is nice but it probably needs some more thinking and/or optimizing. The EPG, which is either extracting the DTT-EPG-data automatically while running or scanning for channels, or is using the open-source XMLTV-format. The upcoming shows of all channels are being presented as a list. You see starting-time, title of the show and the station. In case you want to record a show just click on the little record-button next to the title. It is that simple. Great. Searching for something is nice and fast as well. You type and while typing you get live-results which get more and more detailed as you type. Good job as well.
In our living room at home we have a screen with HD-resolution and a MacMini with eyetv delivering the TV pictures. The eyetv EPG is great because you can get a good overview over some 20 channels or so at once and scan quickly for something interesting. The colour-coding which eyetv uses makes that task even easier. A great way to select the shows you would like to watch. This is barely possible with TheTube. Either you search, or you scroll, and scroll, and scroll … An integration with a paid service like tvtv is not possible either which, to be honest with you is not really important to me since I only used tvtv for a remote recording scheduling once.
Late-comers darling: The recording-functionality
I am not sure whether I will use it often but it is nice to know that TheTube offers you time-shift TV and that you can go back to the beginning of a show and start recording it from there. eyetv does not offer this but only simple time-shift so I guess I have to get used to it and remember it next time it might make sense.
The recordings are represented by small thumbnails and suffer from the small sidebar as well. You can neither see much when going through them nor can you read any show information as within eyetv either. Why can’t I expand the EPG and the recordings panel over the full application window. While checking the EPG in detail, or looking through my recordings, I do not need to see any live TV anyway. When clicking a recording the big screen could come back and shrink the list back to a sidebar anyway. Maybe something for the next version?! Beside that. The recordings worked fine, and you can tell the application how long the recording should run before and after the desired show. Good.
Yes relevant advertising might make sense!
But unfortunately I have not found the channel that broadcasts my desired content plus the relevant advertising. Therefore I really like the cutting functionality in eyetv. Within 2-3 minutes I have deleted all traces of advertising from a movie which makes it possible to see the movie the way the director intended it to be: Without five or six breaks. Especially when you watch your content on an iPod with limited power you do not like wasting precious energy from your battery for displaying or fast-forwarding commercials. TheTube offers an interface to export your recorded material to iMovie (in DV format) to cut and edit it. This is nice but not really feasible: The DV-format produces Gigabytes of data. This fills up your hard-drive–in case you have enough space for such an operation to begin with–and is very slow. Personally I think that this is not a real option to edit your recordings and must be improved in an upcoming version. Beside this short-coming everything seems to work fine.
It’s a mobile world out there
You might want to take your content with you. I have not compared the speed of eyetv and TheTube when exporting your shows to either iPod, iPhone or AppleTV but the important thing is that the option is there. Since I am traveling a lot I have to take many shows with me which made me purchase an elgato Turbo.264 some time ago. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, I cannot take the advantage of this external encoding-coprocessor to TheTube, at least I did not see a way. Only going via iMovie would work, which as I described it earlier is only a theoretical option.
Set-up and settings
The preferences and set-up screens are well organised and offer a lot of options to fine-tune your viewing experience. The defaults make sense and the existence of profiles for different channel-listnings make a lot of sense. Traveling often from Hamburg to Berlin, I have cursed the fact that I had to run the set-up-process in my eyetv software everytime. TheTube makes that a thing of the past. Thanks!
Show me your tuner and I tell you how you watch TV … a summary
It is obvious that the guys at equinux are seriously working on their aim to counterbalance the eyetv dominance on the DTT for Mac market and I think they have done a great job so far. TheTube and the TubeStick are miles ahead of such products like the watchandgo and it’s I-forgot-the-name-software. Some of the features are new and it would be great to see something similar within eyetv, other features that I have learned to love within eyetv are definitely missing. The most severe short-coming is probably the editing and cutting deficiency which is only covered by the iMovie makeshift. The great thing about software is that you can update it and I am sure that equinux is working on this anytime soon.
Summing this up I think that it is fair to say that TheTube is a great solution for everyone who wants to get into DTT on the Mac at a really good price. eyetv for DTT usually costs twice as much which is quite a bit more. If you are really just into watching TV then a TubeStick is probably fine for you. In case you are heavily relying on cutting, editing, and re-encoding your recordings you should probably go for an eyetv-solution maybe even with the great Turbo.264 accelerator.
After my mispurchase (see above) I am happy about the good quality of the TubeStick and guess that I can recommend it to my friend since he does not own an iPod (yet). Currently you might even get a limited version of TheTube including MediaCentral for free as well. I am looking forward to the future development of TheTube 2.0 and the ability to edit content “natively” inside the application.
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