Review: Elgato EyeTV HD

We've all been in this scenario before: You're stuck at work and aching to watch the World Series, or that episode of Mad Men you missed last night. You could just catch a live stream on your office computer, but that'd be conspicuous. What's a TV-loving nerd to do?

For Mac users, Elgato's EyeTV HD is a possible solution. The set-top box creates a bridge between your cable receiver and Mac to turn your computer into a DVR. On your Mac, you can schedule programs for recording straight onto your hard drive, or you can just watch live TV.

The kicker is you can watch live or recorded programs on your iPhone or iPad with a complementary app available in the App Store. Yes, that means while you're "working" you can catch that soccer game or FOX drama on your discreet, puny iPhone screen, or the iPad sitting in your lap where your nosy bosses shouldn't be looking.

Aside from enabling you to veg out anytime and anywhere, being able to watch TV on your iPad in any room is also very liberating. If your living room is being hogged by kids playing Grand Theft Auto, just take your iPad to your bedroom and launch the EyeTV app.

Note that we said complementary app—not complimentary—as the EyeTV app costs $5, which we found to be pretty annoying. The EyeTV HD box alone costs $200, and the iOS app can't work without the hardware at all, so it should be free.

Our Scrooge-ish sentiments aside, the EyeTV box + app combo is a breeze to use, though the setup process is somewhat inelegant. While setting up your Mac and the EyeTV to broadcast to an iPhone or iPad, you must be painfully realistic about the limitations of wireless. On Wi-Fi, both high and standard definition TV programs streamed smoothly and looked great, but over a 3G connection the video skipped a lot, and sometimes it just froze.

Given that iPhone and iPad customers are stuck with AT&T, we had to make generous adjustments to bitrate settings inside the EyeTV app on the Mac in order to get TV shows to stream smoothly over 3G to our iOS devices. The end result is not pretty—but point fingers at the broadband provider, not Elgato.