Last night (well, technically this morning) I followed the advice in Nova T Stick Review where Tim de Ville left a comment hinting towards a piece of software called EyeTV for the Mac which would allow me to use my Digital Freeview USB Dongle under OSX.
All I can say is WOW!
Why?
EyeTV Control Panel
Its now my opinion that Hauppauge should drop their software and help out EyeTV make a Windows compatible version to work with their hardware.
I only used EyeTV for a few minutes but here is what I found:
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- The image quality is superb - I can only assume they use a better codec than Hauppauge. Of course, the OSX interfaces often look better anyway, for example the little display that appears about the channel is nicely alpha faded (and fades in and out) + the control panel looks nice and clean and compact whereas the Hauppauge software looks a little 90's.
- Tuning time was fantastic! - to speed things up, I plugged my laptop straight into the roof aerial. I can only assume the Hauppauge software would have found the same number of channels - however I KNOW that the Hauppauge software would have takes about 10x longer to do so. EyeTV took about 30 seconds (a minute at most) to scan and fund about 70 odd channels and radio stations. It also labels them in the drop down from the control panel if they're premium, normal or radio.
- Channel change time - there was me thinking that it took ages to change channel due to the dongle having to retune or something. Bullcrap. It is - again - poor software from Hauppauge (as far a I can tell). My logic for this is that channel change on EyeTV is almost instant.
All I need to do now is get it working on an indoor aerial and then explore the settings some more.
I will post back when I have used it some more - I might even try to include some screenshot's!