TVMax

reviewed by Chris Marshall

What they say: This revolutionary and stylish little box is really one of a kind.

You are now in control of your TV viewing: watch, pause, rewind, skip forward and record live TV.

You decide what to watch and what to record and it doesnÕt end there. Once that favourite show has been recorded you can choose to edit those boring adverts or cut out uninteresting scenes and keep the things that you really want to watch.

TVMax receives analog over the air (antenna) and analog cable TV and features built-in video hardware compression within its small, yet ever so stylish case. It can even capture VHS tapes, allowing you to store them on your hard drive or burn them onto DVD.

So just sit back and let TVMax do all the hard work. It really will amaze you!

-        Watch, pause, rewind and skip forward Live TV, timeshift on your Mac.

-        Record and edit your favourite shows with our built in EPG (Electronic Program Guide).

-        One click Apple iPod (writes directly to iTunes) or Sony PSP export.

-        Hardware compression to MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX

-        Convert VHS and Hi8 tapes to DVD, TVMax doubles as a video converter.

TVMax ships with EyeTV 2 software that lets you watch analog television on your Mac. Change the way you watch TV with the timeshift feature! Pause or rewind live television at any point, ensuring that youÕll never miss any part of what you are watching.

The integrated online TV guide TitanTV gives you control of your TV schedule, allowing you to schedule TV recordings.

There is no need to be sitting at your Mac to start the recording! TVMax is not only ÒTV on your MacÓ, but also a great solution to say goodbye to your old VHS video recorder. Record straight to your hard drive, in full digital quality!

What I say:

First the administration stuff:

The communication in relation to obtaining the sample unit was first class, which I always think bodes well for future customer service. Before you go all cynical on me and say that a company is bound to be keen to impress at this stage, you would be surprised. I am still waiting for three books to arrive from a company that promised them two months ago, and despite three chase Emails, have still to get them delivered! The few questions that I had were answered promptly and clearly, again a good indication, so from my experience, they are a good company to deal with.

The unit was a review unit so the packaging wasnÕt pristine, but whilst it isnÕt going to be at the Apple end of the spectrum it was competently and effectively packaged, so I donÕt think anyone should worry about damage during shipping.

As for the form factor:

Well if their promotional literature hints at an easy-to-use box a quick look at the actual unit will reinforce that perception. The unit itself is all clean lines and round corners, with just a small eye in the front and the necessary connections at the back. Minimalist and functional, and oh so simple. You have to love that!

Out of the box then and all set up, I hit my only frustration, and this is so minor, it is hardly worth mentioning. The quickstart documentation refers to the user guide, which I hunted around for for a while, before realizing that it was a PDF – see I told you it was hardly worth mentioning, but they could have made it a little clearer and saved me that Òvital 5 minutesÓ before I was ready to fire it all up J At this stage, I will also add that there are a lot of different user guide versions, so make sure you look at the correct one, but having glanced through them all, the basics are pretty much the same to be honest, and if you are even half way techy you arenÕt really going to need them.

By this stage I was pretty excited, as I have been wanting a device like this for a long time. Certainly since I first got my PowerBook and as luck would have it, I had just installed a Sky + system (TiVo like device) so it was going to be a good comparison (I will be doing an article in future months on how the two devices work for me).

My set up means that the review was going to be somewhat limited, as I receive all my channels through a satellite receiver, so my feed into the Mac was only ever going to be the one feed from the satellite system. This meant that I wasnÕt going to be able to use the remote control that came with the unit, and I was going to have to be tuned into the satellite channel that I wanted to record. To be honest I was a little concerned about this at first, but with the auto-view function on the satellite system (turns over to the program that you want to watch automatically) and the eyetv schedule program feature, it really wasnÕt a problem. Sure, I had to set two devices to watch/record the program, and it limited me from watching any other program on that TV at the time is was recording, but I didnÕt find this to be a problem. This is where the beauty of running both Sky + and TVMax really kicked in, as it allowed me to record one program on the Mac and another on the Sky + box. As I have a second satellite receiver in the apartment as well, I could always pop along to our media room to watch anything else that I fancied at the same time.

For this review, I was using a PowerBook G4 with 1.5GB RAM and I had absolutely no problems at all. As this machine is my every-day machine, it has somewhat limited disc space (about 20GB out of 100GB free) so I wanted to copy some of the recorded films over to an external hard drive and here I hit a couple of problems. Without eyetv installed on my PC I couldnÕt view the films. I kept getting a codec incompatibility with media player problem, and I also found out that a FAT32-formatted hard drive has a 4GB file limit for transfer. Both problems were easily resolved by exporting the original recording to QuickTime format (just one of many useful and easy formats), and then I could view them on any PC in the apartment and copy to an external drive as well.

Without giving too much away regarding how it compares to the Sky +, suffice to say that you can edit easily and that is a huge benefit. To be fair, it isnÕt the most advanced editor that you will find and it is somewhat tiresome trying to achieve the professional (seamless) editing out any adverts, but as this occurs on so few movies that I record, it wasnÕt a problem at all, and it was nice to be able to edit out the slack at the beginning and end of the recording time. I tended to do this before I exported to QuickTime, but of course you have other options. I wanted to stick to the options that came with the device.

I even exported some material to my 5G 60GB iPod with video, and it was unbelievably simple. Now I canÕt actually see me doing this that often, but that is purely because of the way I use (or donÕt use) my iPod. If you have a commute and want to catch up on the latest episode of something you have recorded, this will really appeal to you. Just for good measure, I tried it with my PSP as well, and boy was that impressive compared to the decoding and burning to memory stick option that I used before on my PC!

Unfortunately I canÕt really comment on the practicality of the program guide function, as I couldnÕt use it with the set up I was restricted to. I did take a look at it and it looked pretty solid, so I canÕt see any reason why it wouldnÕt be as good as everything else that I reviewed.

And finally, as you would expect, the copying from Video worked a treat.

I may not be in my Òmedia heavenÓ yet, but I am well on my way and the TVMax is going to be a HUGE part of it J

In summary: Buy It! I am going to, for sure.

I will also be buying a Mac Mini to use solely with the TVMax hooked up permanently to my TV. As I said earlier, I will write about how this works for me at the same time as I do the comparison of TVMax and Sky +, or to be more precisely, how they sit side by side and complete by home media solution.

I totally rate this product and really canÕt recommend it enough, especially if you are looking for a reason to get a Mac Mini as well J