If you’ve been jonesing to watch Planet Earth in HD on your Mac, you have an unsettling fascination with David Attenborough and a new way to fulfil it. Elgato has just released EyeTV Sat, a satellite TV tuner for Macs.
As long as you’ve got a pre-existing home satellite dish, it will connect directly to your Mac via USB 2.0 to receive DVD-S and DVB-S2 transmissions. That means you can watch free -to-air digital satellite channels on your Mac including BBC HD.
EyeTV Sat will also act as a DVR allowing you to watch, record and edit programmes as well as rewinding and pausing live broadcasts. Files are encoded in lossless MPEG-2/H.264 files which will be hefty but the same quality as broadcast.
That means you could hypothetically add those files to your iTunes library to watch on your iPod or iPhone. We couldn’t possibly comment on that though.
For Windows fans, the tuner comes with compatible software. It also supports multilingual programming, Teletext and Dolby Digital sound. It’s available online now and will be stocked by Apple stores and Mac resellers.
Out now | £179.95 | Elgato
