eyeTV (for Education) in Canada

UPDATE (Aug. 28, 2008): Elgato is planning to introduce a guide for eyeTV for Canadian users. You may sign-up to be notified at http://services.eyetv.com/canada.

(Note: Guillaume's solution for providing EPG, an electronic program guide, no longer works - though it's not his fault! Please visit our Programming eyeTV: A Work-around for Canadian Users posting for another solution.)

Teachers need TV. After all, what else is there to do with all that vacation time?

However, apart from simply crashing on the couch to regenerate the brain with degenerative pre-recorded drivel, there can be also an educational purpose to setting up a digital TV recorder on your Mac. Many great video resources are available on YouTube, however, in the inimitable wisdom of many a school and/or Board policy, these resources are regularly and uncritically blocked from access within the school network. There are, however, a number of solutions including TubeSock, QuickTime Pro, iShowU, ScreenRecord, iTunes, Mac the Ripper, Visual Hub, bit Torrent, P2P, and eyeTV that can allow you to store video resources, downloaded from the net or ripped from DVDs for use in the classroom. (Very important note: Please check your own country's "Fair Use" laws about copyrighted material used for educational purposes. Learning to make license plates in prison is no fun. The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada has a pamphlet called Copyright Matters outlining the status of "fair dealing" and "educational exemption". "Fair Use" is a doctrine in the U.S.A. that allows broader use of the copyrighted material than Canadian "fair dealing". This and tax deductable mortgages are two wonderful American ideas that Canadians have yet to embrace. )

So, assuming you and your posse of legal advisors believe you would like to proceed, read on...

Elgato's eyetv hybrid television tuner can be set up with Mac mini for a, relatively-speaking-in-a-conspicucuous-consumption-consumer-driven-western-capitalism-socitey-way, decent Mac-based DVR ("Digital Video Recorder") solution.

• save time from surfing aimlessly through the cable tv line-up by having preferred shows recorded, and conveniently ready to view
• skip brain-numbing, mind-warping ads
• record, edit and archive useful resources for teaching (of course, only where copyright allows this reproduction)
• save money

In short, the pros:

• the quality of the recordings, displayed on a 42" plasma, are acceptable
• pause tv works like a charm
• the integrated software, EyeTV 2, is reasonably intuitive and stable
• software is stable and reliable (so far)

Cons:

• no built-in support for tv program guide in Canada, making setting recordings manually as the only option (unless you use the solution below)
• a ground hum from the cable connection (though this is almost certainly a fault of our cable connection, and not a problem with the EyeTV hardware)

Here, however, is the key to making EyeTV work in Canada:

EyeTV EPG Proxy

Guillaume Boudreau, at Pomme Pause, has kindly provided a download and instructions for setting up an EPG proxy (don't ask me what that is - it just works!) to enable the EyeTV program guide for Canada.

I can't say enough kind words about this gentleman's work.

Did I also mention that he has provided his hack free of charge?

I have faith indeed in human-kind again... when I'm not watching my EyeTV.