Elgato Offers Analog & Digital on Same TV Stick

If you are traveling between areas that have already upgraded to digital TV and that are still stuck at grand old analog, you're best to be prepared for both worlds. Elgato's EyeTV Hybrid will come in handy in this case. The USB TV dongle comes in two different versions aimed at American and international Mac users. The benefits to digital TV are obvious: introduction of high-def and Dolby Digital.

Interestingly, in digital mode, the EyeTV Hybrid will take less CPU usage to record than to playback since Mac simply receives the content in pre-encoded MPEG directly from broadcasters. But to watch the content (especially in 720p or higher), you will need at least a Dual PowerPC G5 or an Intel Core Duo. In analog mode, the software encoding will kick in and drains about half the CPU resource of a Intel iMac 1.83Ghz, as seen on Miglia TVMicro. Playing back the video (much lower res) will be a piece of cake for the same machine.

Filed under USB Video Capture & USB Video Cards