Recently, Elgato released EyeTV for the iPhone (AppStore Link). At a cost of $4.99, its marketing blurb offers the following functionality:

With the EyeTV app, you can watch, record, and enjoy live and recorded TV on your iPhone or iPod touch. At last, you don‘t have to leave all your great TV shows at home; the EyeTV app puts the power of award-winning EyeTV in the palm of your hand.

The EyeTV app accesses EyeTV running on your Mac at home to deliver these great features to your iPhone:

• Watch live TV and change channels anywhere (Wi-Fi connection required)
• Watch your EyeTV recordings
• Browse the comprehensive Program Guide
• Start recordings back home on your Mac immediately or schedule them for later
• View and edit your recording schedules

How Does it Measure Up?

Now that we know the promises, how does the functionality work in practise and does it live up to the hype? To set the picture accurately; my set up is a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo Mac mini with 2GB of RAM and two Elgato Digital USB Tuner sticks. This is hooked up to an Airport Express, which extends my existing wireless connection from another room. Between myself and my wife, we have an iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 2nd Gen, so I will be testing EyeTV on all three looking for differences.

Setting Up and Preparing

After downloading the EyeTV app from iTunes and installing onto my three iDevices, I had to update EyeTV to version 3.2 on my Mac mini by simply checking for updates. Once updated, switching on iPhone streaming was a simple option in the preferences.

There is also functionality for using Elgato’s servers to allow connecting to your EyeTV device from outside your wireless network called “My EyeTV.” This works in a similar manner to Apple’s “Back To My Mac” functionality of MobileMe and requires UPnP support between your EyeTV host and your router. Because I have an AirPort Express extended network, UPnP didn’t work — but I was able to manually configure a port forwarding rule in my router on port 2170 to make the service work.

Advanced options allow you to require a passcode to connecting a device and the option to automatically convert recordings into a format suitable for streaming at a later time. While Live TV does not need to be prepared, recorded content does.

You can however, also prepare recordings manually, on a case-by-case basis.

After starting the iPhone app and entering my “My EyeTV” details, I get the option of connecting via Wi-Fi (on the bottom) and via “My EyeTV” (on top). When connected to my local wireless, the “My EyeTV” connection did not work (of course you wouldn’t want to do this, but the software doesn’t detect this in any way).

Selecting the local Wi-Fi option connects quickly and presents the app’s main menu.

Watching Live TV

Selecting LiveTV gives a list of channels and what is currently showing.

Clicking on the green icon on the right displays the upcoming programs on that channel.

I can then select the current show to get a summary and an option to “Watch Now.”

This process then takes about 20 seconds of processing and streaming before I get picture and sound, which is smooth and crisp and just as one would expect.

Tapping on the screen brings up the controls which allow pausing, rewinding 30 seconds (and jumping back to the live stream), a volume control and resizing between widescreen (just like in the iPod app).

Pressing the ‘gear’ icon displayed in the top right of the channel listing presents a bandwidth/quality settings screen to enable you to tweak the size of the stream. This worked well and allows you to find the right setting for your moment. The lowest setting is about equal to the early days of You Tube while the highest setting is flawless.

Watching Recordings

Pressing the recordings menu gives you a sub menu to narrow down searching for an existing recording.

Selecting an option (such as Library) gives a list of individual recordings.

While there is no way to search directly for a recording, you can sort the list by a number of means.

Unlike live TV, when watching a recording you get full track scrubbing navigation, not just ‘back 30 seconds.’

The quality of recordings is not configurable like LiveTV is, it depends on the quality options you selected for ‘preparing recordings’ on your Mac. Cellular quality is very low and like You Tube, but if you’re on wireless (or on a jailbroken phone with 3G Un-Restrictor) you get full quality.

Schedules

Schedules let you see what upcoming recordings you have scheduled.

All you can do here is browse and remove an item from the schedule.

Guide

The Guide gives you access to the full electronic TV guide available in your Mac’s EyeTV software, this is exactly the same as when browsing the guide for Live TV, except instead of an option to “Watch Now,” the button is “Record,” which will add the show to your recording schedule.

The Verdict

There is no noticeable speed differences with performance between the iPhone 3G, iPod touch 2nd Gen or the iPhone 3GS. The bottleneck here is available bandwidth and the speed of the host computer. Generally, the functionality works as advertised, however there are some limitations to be aware of, and some version 1.0 bugs that need to be squashed.

• Live streaming does not work on 3G, requires Wi-Fi — thanks AT&T, for affecting my functionality in Australia. However, on a jailbroken phone, I was able to successfully use 3G Unrestrictor to fool EyeTV into thinking it was on Wi-Fi, thus allowing it to work. This worked at a much higher quality than I expected and was also very smooth. Well worth the $2.99 it costs for 3G Unrestrictor.
• Streaming only supports one device at a time. Connecting with my iPhone and watching a live TV stream, then connecting with my iPod touch works, but when actually selecting a channel to view on the iPod touch, it drops the stream for the iPhone. This is probably fair enough as one stream is pretty CPU intensive as it is.
• When both recording a show and streaming live TV, I had two instances of the host application crash, requiring a full EyeTV restart to allow connections again.
• When testing across the Internet while on my work’s wireless, or on 3G, I found my iPhone’s EyeTV app constantly crashing whenever it tried to connect. This seemed to be an issue with the EyeConnect helper software on my Mac mini, which needed to be restarted by turning EyeTV sharing off and on again in my Mac mini.
• When stopping a live or recorded stream, the CPU usage on the host computer often stays high for 5-10 minutes. It looks like its continuing to stream data out and didn’t get the ’stop’ message from the iPhone. This does seem to eventually time out and really isn’t a big problem unless the CPU usage causes you a problem.
• It would be a nice option to be able to ‘prepare’ a recording for the iPhone remotely.

Once Elgato gets a software update out for both ends of the solution (iPhone and OS X) to fix the crash bugs and bring stability to the software, this will be absolutely great. Until then, it’s a bit of hit and miss, it may work fine or it may need someone to be at your computer to restart software before it works, which defeats the purpose. Elgato is working hard on its forums to replicate user’s issues and make this stable, so its a bright future ahead.

After our report yesterday that in-car GPS system TomTom had released an iPhone app in New Zealand, it appears the app is now available for purchase elsewhere, including the US and UK. Mapping data is available for New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, US & Canada and Western Europe [iTunes link].

Obviously you’ll need an iPhone 3G or 3GS to make it work. What’s more, it’s not cheap: in the region of $100. However, in most cases that’s much cheaper than a standalone GPS unit.

UK site Recombu downloaded the app and took it for a test drive (video below). While it comes highly recommended, the app does of course pause when you receive an inbound phone call.

Tags: iphone, TomTom

VideoUp is a application created by Raizlabs. While they are in no way affiliated with Facebook, the social network was nice enough to help them fix a couple bugs to get it ready for the App Store, founder Greg Raiz tells us. That’s good news because it means Facebook apparently isn’t being tyrannical and demanding that its official app is the only one that will be able to do video uploads to the network.

VideoUp is very simple. You login to your Facebook account via Facebook Connect, choose which video you wish to upload (you can pick one in your library or shoot a new one), enter a description, and you’re done. What’s really pretty amazing about the app is just how fast it uploads the videos. The 16-second test video I shot below was uploaded and playable on Facebook in under a minute. That easily beats the YouTube upload times from the iPhone 3GS, and the quality seems much better.

VideoUp recommends that you hold your iPhone horizontally, so it appears correctly on Facebook. However, if you do it vertically, it’s easy to rotate the video there as well. Obviously, this will only work with the new iPhone 3GS, which has video capabilities.

You can find VideoUp for Facebook in the App Store here. It is $0.99.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

When I purchased my new 3gs I wanted to protect it right out of the box. So I opted for a red iskin solo because it wa the thinnest case icoukd find at the apple store

I have been a long time fan of zagg skins because I like the naked iPhone size and feel… But the skin on the back of my white iPhone began looking dingy and discolored. And the corners began picking up lint…

After using the iskin for a week, I am not too impressed.

I had to remove it the iskin in order to dock it to my external speakers when I was the beach… Not cool

I like how it covers the bezel, but it looks like the bottom edge is already getting stretched out.

I have ordered a really cool looking metallic case from
More- thing.com

Update – just got the new case. Love It!

It it really rad

Only complaint is that it doesn’t cover the bezel completely… Not a big deal though

Also – ditched the mirror file that came with the iskin

Now I rocking the anti glare from power support

Love it!

Very pleased with this setup

You should try it!

The app, which is $4.99, is very simple. You boot it up, log in (or create a new account), and you’re taken to a screen where you put in a title for your “show” (what you’re about to broadcast). Below that are links to add video, a photo, and/or a link. If you choose to add a video you can easily take a new video, or use one you’ve already shot with your iPhone 3GS. The video capture functionality is fast and works just as well as the iPhone’s own video capturing app.

But the real killer features of the Kyte app are its upload speed and even more so, the quality of its videos. While I’ve already gone in depth about why I think video is the killer feature for the iPhone 3GS, based mainly on how well the videos shot on the device look, and how easily they are uploaded to YouTube. But in testing this app out today, I’d say that Kyte’s offering is at least as compelling from an ease-of-use perspective. The video upload was about as speedy as it was to YouTube, but it didn’t feature the annoying rendering time of the YouTube videos I’ve uploaded. And the video quality is noticeably better on Kyte than on YouTube when uploaded from the iPhone 3GS (see below).

One downside to recording the videos in the Kyte app is that they don’t save to your video library on the phone. The other downside is the price: As I mentioned, $4.99. But that’s to make it clear that Kyte is intending this app for its commercial publishers, we’re told. But any Kyte users is able to use it and really, $4.99 isn’t a bad price for a video app that works this well.

This offering is the latest in Kyte’s mobile strategy with regards to the iPhone. Last month, it rolled out a series of branded iPhone apps. Of course, as a live-streaming service, Kyte would love to be able to live-stream from the iPhone 3GS, but that’s still not allowed yet. Hopefully that will change one day.

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