Elgato EyeTV 310, satellite TV on your Mac

By: Erik Vlietinck - Last Updated: Mon 09 March 2009

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Elgato EyeTV 310 is the only digital satellite tuner that is available for use with a Mac. It’s the most expensive tuner Elgato sells, but it really is a small, complete digital satellite TV and radio tuner you can equip with a pay-TV card.

The Elgato EyeTV 310 looks like a small set-top box, and comes with the excellent EyeTV software, a FireWire cable and a Quick Start Guide. It lacks the tiny and stunning design of Elgato’s other products and while it looks like being made in metal, it’s made of plastic instead. Still, it looks rather nice and is small enough not to be obtrusive in any way.

The coax antenna connector on the EyeTV 310 accepts an RG-6 coaxial satellite cable. This allows you to connect it to the feed from a satellite dish (the Elgato web site lists the compatible systems).

Setting up the EyeTV 310 by itself is just as much a no-brainer as setting up Elgato’s other EyeTV products, but setting up the satellite dish is another story altogether. The EyeTV software will only help with directing the dish by activating the “Signal Quality” announcement, after which your Mac will continuously shout at you if EyeTV is detecting anything useful. The “Auto-Tune” feature that I used with the terrestrial EyeTV products is of no use with the satellite tuner, making the tune-in process a lot harder.

To catch satellite broadcasts you first need to enter the name and orbital position of a specific satellite into the EyeTV software. By default and in Europe, the EyeTV software locks onto the European Astra satellite at 19.20 degrees East. The EyeTV software lets you chose different satellites from its menu.

The satellite list gives you the names of the various satellites but doesn’t tell you which channels you can receive through each of them. A visit to a number of digital satellite receiver web sites taught me how to set up EyeTV correctly.

As I couldn’t use a large, permanently fixed dish (forbidden where I tested the system) it took me quite a while to set up the dish and the software for the few hours of joy I had with the unit. My advice therefore is that if you can’t install a good satellite dish, don’t bother—it will only aggravate you to set it all up, especially when the Mac with the EyeTV 310 is more than five meters from where the dish should be installed.

Freeview and Pay-TV ready

The EyeTV software took some 15 minutes to get a full selection of the more than one thousand TV channels available on the satellite I tuned into. Of course, there is no thing as a free lunch, so the best channels are encrypted. These are the so-called pay-TV channels which are only available to subscribers who have pay-TV card.

The Elgato EyeTV 310 has a Common Interface slot that allows you to insert pre-paid cards providing access to pay-TV. Luckily, the BBC has decided to let all satellite dish owners tune in to their digital satellite channels, including the High-Definition ones. During the hours the satellite dish was installed, I could enjoy HD TV on my old Power Mac G5. The broadcast quality was stunning, but when a gust of wind decided to give my wobbly dish a small hint it really should be directed more westerly, the stunning quality immediately gave way to beautiful image and audio noise.

After “securing” the dish with a few kilos of extra weight hanging from its tripod legs, the dish remained stable for the rest of the review. Needless to say, the EyeTV software does a great job of recording digital satellite TV broadcasts, and optionally burning them with Toast Titanium 10. I can easily see the use of HD recordings being burned to Blu-Ray discs with Roxio’s Blu-Ray plug-in.

Elgato has made sure its satellite tuner is ready for the future. The EyeTV 310 can receive and record broadcasts that use the newer DVB-S2 standard. The new standard uses H.264 compression, which allows you to record shows and movies without the need for conversion.

At the end of the day, I had to remove the satellite dish from the balcony again, ready to be stored with its rather expensive (15 meters long!) special coax cable. I re-packed the EyeTV 310 in its box with mixed feelings. The HD broadcasts I have seen make me drool, but the skimpy dish I was allowed to temporarily install took out all the fun.

As for judging the Elgato EyeTV 310 on its own merits, I can only say the unit performed flawlessly, with excellent image quality. I would like to see the setup system to be somewhat less complicated, but setting up a dish normally is the work of a specialised technician, so I don’t think I can blame the system for my experiences with it.

I liked the way the software performed just as much as with every other Elgato product. The best thing about all of this, is that Elgato even has lowered its price for the EyeTV 310 to just under 250 Euros.