When home theater computers first came to market almost 10 years ago, the television tuners that were available were few and far between, all internal, and featured a whopping single tuner. How times have changed. The Elgato EyeTV Hybrid ($149 list) is an example of the former: this USB stick isn't much bigger than a standard thumbdrive, but it's a full-on TV tuner, complete with a coaxial jack on one end. Now, dual tuners are a given and hybrid tuners seek to accomplish the duty of one-size-fits-all for all customers. Technical Specs First a bit about Elgato Elgato produces award-winning TV software together with a complete range of TV tuners and capture devices to watch, record, and edit TV and HDTV on Macs and PCs. Elgato is the home of EyeTV, the world’s leading television solution for Mac computers. Elgato also produces a variety of world-class H.264 video conversion and streaming products. Elgato is privately held with offices in Munich, Germany and San Francisco, California. And the EyeTV Hybrid tuner: Our smallest hybrid TV tuner ever, EyeTV Hybrid packs a lot of features into one very small TV stick. Powerful and versatile, EyeTV Hybrid is the right choice if you get your TV signal from basic (unscrambled) cable. But that’s not all – EyeTV Hybrid can receive digital TV with an antenna, and can also capture standard definition video from analog sources such a camcorder or VCR. The tuner used within the device is the ATI Theater HD 750 chip and offers a number of features according to the. It’s important to note if you are shopping around that Elgato has already had a previously named “EyeTV Hybrid” product from several years ago that is a different unit. ![]() It looks different and I believe contains a different tuner, so if you’re looking for the best price please be cautious and make sure it’s the new model. As you can see from the images of the tuner itself, it is shockingly small in size weighing 16 grams and sizing up at 62x21x10mm–that’s tiny! Of course, when you add the coaxial adapter or the S-Video cable it makes the unit larger, but you would have that issue with any tuner of this size. Setting It Up & Testing – Windows 7 I used my main Windows 7 Ultimate PC for my initial tests (Intel Core i5-330, 4GB DDR3, 80GB SSD). Installing the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid could not have been simpler–you plug it into your system and–in Windows 7–let the unit self install. I did not need to install any drivers before Windows 7 Media Center prompted me that a new TV Tuner had been detected and asking if I wanted to set it up. Tuner setup was a smooth experience with everything being detected–including both an analog NTSC signal as well as a digital QAM signal. Usb footswitch fs1 p drivers for macbook pro. For the purposes of this review, since NTSC is pretty much extinct, I will solely focus on the digital experience. By manually configuring the tuner within Windows 7 Media Center, I was able to exclusively use the digital tuner of the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid tuner and it detected the same amount (38) of unencrypted QAM channels as my other QAM tuners. In real-world testing, the tuner performs fantastic. Picture quality was sharp and channel changing was very prompt–approximately 2 seconds digital-to-digital. I used the 4-1-1-Info tip for Windows Media Center to compare the picture quality of the stream to that of an HDHomeRun and the quality was comparable.
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