EyeTV is the name of a family of products that let you watch, record, and even schedule TV shows on your Macintosh. I am not sure you could say it turns your Macintosh into a TiVo but that is the idea. Actually, these days a TiVo does a lot more than just schedule/record/play your TV shows - but that is what it is best known for. El Gato just released EyeTV software version 2.0. If you bought your EyeTV device before December 2005, you have to pay for the upgrade. If not, you can get it for free and save yourself the $49 upgrade fee. Actually, if you have an EyeTV device already, you had better hustle - because the $49 is a special short-term offer price. The regular price is going to be a little higher than that. There are two new features in this version. You can save your TV shows to your Video iPod now, if you have one. And, there is a new desktop application for viewing and changing your TV schedule. Under the old scheme, in EyeTV 1, you would go to the Titan TV web site using your web browser. Feasible, but I have a hunch this new way works smoother and looks a little bit nicer. Not to knock the Titan TV web site; I like it a lot. I just upgraded. So, if anyone has any questions about it, post a comment to this blog entry and I will try to tell you what I know. Right now, that is not much. But by the end of this weekend I should be a wiz at it. By the way, the USA transition to purely digital TV from the current NTSC standard, will be complete in 3 years. What will happen then? Well, as I understand it, your non-digital TV set will stop receiving signals off the airwaves. So in order to keep watching broadcast (non-cable, non-satellite) TV in the fashion you have grown accustomed to for almost the last century, you will need to buy a digital-to-analog adapter for your old TV set - or buy a new TV set. A 3rd option is to look at a digital TV receiver for your home computer. I bought the El Gato EyeTV 500, which is designed to work in the US. It is a digital receiver for the Mac and it has a Firewire connection on it. Firewire is a very fast computer-to-device interface, and it is a good thing too. Digital TV shows can use very high resolutions, and that is a lot of pixels - which translates into a lot of bytes of memory to move from the receiver to the computer a bunch of times per second. A USB 1.1 interface would probably not be able to keep up. I am not sure if a USB 2.0 interface could. With the Firewire interface, though, I have no worries. Anyway, if you already have a fast, new computer with a big screen and good sound - adding digital TV to it for under $400 might be a lot more economical solution than going out and buying a digital TV set for $600 or more. And, it will give you better resolution than slapping an adapter on a regular, old TV set. Instead of the low resolution video you are used to, you can be experiencing the high resolution of HDTV video. If you are in the market for a new computer this year, you should check out the new Apple iMac systems. They have 17" or 20" flat screen LCD monitors - in fact, the whole computer is in that monitor! They do not take up much space, trust me! I have a 20" iMac G5 and it has a desktop footprint smaller than my shin. Very nice for watching TV shows. I just now looked up Intel compatibility of EyeTV 2 in the product's FAQ. They say it runs now in the Rosetta (PowerPC emulator) on the new Intel-based Macs. They have been working since mid-2005 to convert the whole application over to Intel. They say when they get that done, an updated Intel version of the software will be available for free. I am a programmer who has programmed Intel family and other family processors since the early 1980s. I have looked over information about Apple's new Intel/PowerPC compatible Xcode compiler/editor/debugger. In the past, this might have been a difficult, painful conversion process for their programmers. However, thanks to Apple's long time commitment to Intel-compatibility, which they kept under wraps - and their free Xcode computer programming tool - and the wealth of information they have recently made available for free to us developers, a huge burden has been lifted from the shoulders of the EyeTV programmers. El Gato thoughtfully provides an RSS feed to their FAQ. So, those of us with Macs running the Mac OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) operating system, it is easy to view it in the splendid Safari 2 web browser that comes with the OS, and bookmark the page to come back to it at any time to see if there have been any new developments reported in the FAQ. So there you have it. That is why I am happy about the new version 2.0 of the EyeTV software!