Reviews for Elgato EyeTV Hybrid

I purchased this solely for playing my PS3 through my 15" MacBook Pro's display. Aside from it only supporting 480i resolution due to the composite connection, the video lag is PLENTY enough to make gameplay fully unplayable, despite claims on their website that the lag is barely noticeable.

I did not use this for viewing television, so my rating is not a reflection of that aspect.

I was also delighted with this product at first, how it lets you watch and record TV on the mac. But then soon started having all the same problems already described, including the casing falling apart, and then finally a connector piece broke. Lasted maybe 7 months.

I ordered EyeTV Hybrid a couple of months ago. The *first* one arrived a few days late and after a couple of days of unsuccessful installation attempts, found it was DOA. Elgato has no telephone support and their online techs take three or four days to respond. Consequently, it took a couple of additional weeks to receive a replacement for the dead unit. Not a great first impression!

The design of the tuner is attractive, but is so wide that it blocks adjacent ports (Elgato supplies a cable to alleviate the problem) and the unit can not be plugged into non-powered USB ports (on keyboard or routers, etc.). The learning curve is significant because the unit is not very forgiving. It can't record well directly to a peripheral hard disk (Time Capsule in my case) and a typical HDTV 120 minute movie is a whopping 12GB file! Fit that on your desktop or iPod/iPhone. The unit comes with a remote, but mine hasn't worked yet, after two months of trial.

When EyeTV works it's fine, but it's a rare occurrence. It requires lots of patience and persistence to record and edit the perfect program and you can't record with EyeTV and simultaneously watch another channel. It's finicky, doesn't always wake the computer to record. Recorded "seasons" can be pixelated and lag. And, remember the huge file sizes must be manually saved to a hard disk, which takes as long as it did to record. This is not a "plug-and-play" device. As a straightforward tuner for a Mac it's great with one exception. You only get one free year to the program guide, after that you'll be paying annual fees for searching and recording.