First off, let me say that this is the 4th computer / TV scenario I've invested in over the years. The first, which was 10 years ago, was a PC card that went inside your computer, and had very dodgy drivers which meant it crashed the software, or the computer, or both. None since has been long-term reliable, and the last time I tried was maybe a couple of years ago, with similar results.

So recently I thought I'd have another go. This is a Mac system, I thought. How can it fail? The reviews were good. It was not cheap. I took a deep breath and ordered one.

First disappointment was that to make it work in dual tuner mode, you have to plug in two aerials. Er, why? Why could they not have designed it with a switch in the software's control panel to say 'use in dual tuner mode but use the signal going to one aerial'?

Instead you have to connect your single aerial, if that's how you want to use it (and they endorse this in their FAQ), via two different types of aerial socket: one standard TV aerial socket, and one miniature newfangled type one. So to get it to work off the same aerial, I had to go out and BUY an adaptor, and an aerial splitter, and a length of aerial cable, and the resulting mess of cables takes up the same space as about 50 of the units themselves and cost about a tenner. Bloody marvellous.

And don't get me started on the 'remote control'. Only half of its name is valid, since it is certainly 'remote', but it doesn't really do much in the way of 'control'. If you happen to get it pointed at exactly the right angle and you press the button at exactly the right time, you might be lucky and it may do more or less what you were asking, but I reckon on about a 1 in 10 success rate.

So that brings me to the software. Installation was fine. It looks nice. You sign up for a TV listings service (free for the first year but sspiciously no mention of cost thereafter, no matter how hard you try and find out) and the programme guide appears in lovely Maccish colours and all looks great. Until you ask it to do something not totally straightforward.

Last night is the second time something like this happened so I'm now convinced it was not me doing something stupid. I set two programmes up to record one after the other. A short way into the first, I started watching it from the beginning (you are supposed to be able to do this -- it's one of the joys of this sort of setup). When it was almost finished, I paused it.

It was paused for about 10 minutes when, in *real time* the programme finished. I realised this when the still still image on the telly changed, and I noticed the time. Ah well, I thought, it's just gone back to the start -- irritating but no more than that. So I went to the scheduler to double-click the programme and go through the process of getting to my 10-minutes-to-the-end position again, and noticed that the programme following it was NOT recording. So I went to schedule it, but it said it had already been recorded. So I thought 'fuck this' and clicked 'record' so it would just record without being scheduled.

This morning at 5 I got up for a pee and though 'I'd better turn the recording off'. And guess what. The sodding thing was '0 seconds long' and when double-clicked comes up with a message 'The recording is invalid' or something. No shit.

So I've missed the program I wanted to record, for the second time.

The next problem is to do with it getting confused about how many channels it has. I was watching something the other day and wanted to record it and start watching something else on another channel. So I clicked 'schedule' while watching the first thing, then went to the programme guide and double-clicked the other thing so it would open in another window using the SECOND TUNER but it said words to the effect of 'You are currently recording blah blah. Please stop the recording before trying to change channels'. No! I said, but it didn't understand.

I eventually was able to open another telly window but it came up with the same channel, and no amount of persuasion would convince it it had a spare tuner and could readily use that to show me what I wanted to watch while it used the other to continue recording the thing it was recording. In the end I had to stop the recording, bring up the channel I wanted to watch, bring up another channel window, change it to the channel I wanted to record, click 'record' and then change back to the channel I wanted to watch. I couldn't any longer click 'schedule' on it because that was greyed out because it thought I had already recorded it (even though we were at this stage but 3 or 4 minutes into the sodding programme), so rather than a scheduled recording, I had to hang around until the end of the recording to switch it off.

All of this is accelerating my desire to get a dedicated machine specced up for this... it has to be a Linux PC-based free system called MythTV which looks simply awesome in comparison.

Elgato EyeTV? Pile of shite.

--