MIGLIA TECH Evolution TV Digital Video Capture and Recorder for Macintosh

MIGLIA TECH Evolution TV Digital Video Capture and Recorder for Macintosh

With EvolutionTV, now is the time to say good-bye to your VHS recorder! Featuring MPEG-2/4 and DivX hardware compression, EvolutionTV is the most advanced digital video recorder available for your Macintosh computer. Delivering a clean and sharp picture, EvolutionTV comes with fully featured software enabling you to watch and record TV, schedule recordings, access Online TV guides and much more! Thanks to its state of the art built-in video compression hardware, EvolutionTV will let you store hours of TV programs on a single DVD! EvolutionTV integrates Decisionmark's TitanTV EPG (Electronic Program Guide) directly into the program. Decisionmark is the leading online EPG technology provider in the USA, offering you the most complete guide to what is on TV at your particular location. Decisionmark's TitanTV EPG makes it easy to find your favorite shows and schedule them for recording or viewing with a single click
Customer Review: Only an option if you don't want to record to DVD
I read through lots of reviews but didn't figure the Elgato TV200 was worth it, even at $280. I got this one for $230 even though there more negative reviews. Good thing Amazon has a return policy.

Here's the scoop.

Very easy to install and set up. After that, things go downhill.

I tried to transfer a movie from Laserdisk, but once it was done, I then edited it with the edit movie function and tried to save it to my hard drive and it said that I didn't have enough space on it even though I have over 100gigs free. So I saved the original to another drive. But once I moved the file, I was unable to edit it, because the program will only let you edit the original, unmoved file. Even though I renamed the file exactly, the program wouldn't let me edit it. Hence the only way to save it to disk was to not edit it. But I bought the thing to edit video.

So instead of recording in mpeg-2, I went with the mpeg-4 format that I know can be edited in iMovie. So it does it, and then it takes 65 minutes (at good quality recording) to import on my 1.5Ghz powerbook. Horrible. Not only that, once I got done editing and burned to disk, the actual image quality is a lot worse than if it was a VCR tape on SLP. What's the point of burning it to disk if it looks like garbage?

So I wouldn't advise buying this product unless you really don't care about editing what you record, or don't care about time constraints and quality of video from editing via iMovie.

For me, I think I'll stick to importing things via firewire from a miniDV camcorder for my laserdisks and just use my trusty VCR for programs off the TV. Good luck.

P.S. One thing I would say was the product support people were very attentive. They didn't solve the problem, but were always quick in returning every email I sent. They're in England though so the turnaround for the U.S. was usually a day.

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