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EyeHome

by Adam Thornton

As seen in MAKE 02 Toolbox

Type(s): Computer Hardware, Electronics/Gadget, Household Product
Tags: video audio ilife home+theater

http://elgato.com/
$200 (US, estimated) Buy from amazon.com

Tool photo.

Elgato's EyeHome is my favorite new toy. It's fundamentally an iLife-to-audio-and-video converter: plug an ethernet cable into the "input" side of it, and then connect the A/V outputs of your choice (RCA-jack analog or SPDIF audio; video is composite, component, or S-Video) to your home theater system (in my case, a crappy TV and an ancient stereo). The EyeHome communicates (HTTP over port 8000) with an EyeHome server installed on a Mac in the network, requests content, and plays it back. It works just fine over 802.11g. The unit is tiny: 8"x8"x1½" and weighs less than a pound. And, because it's fanless, it's utterly silent.

The content it plays can be EyeTV-recorded TV shows, music from your iTunes library, video files, or photos from iPhoto albums. There's also a web browser of limited utility. For the things I most wanted to do with it — listen to music and watch movies — it works marvelously. I can hear some compression artifacts in the audio (a tinny high end and some overall murkiness), but it's still quite listenable. The picture viewer is at least as good as my DVD player's JPG viewer.

Its inability to play purchased iTunes Music Store tracks or QuickTime movies is a bit distressing, but if you're willing to put up with some transcoding to get your video into MPEG or DivX format and your audio into something without DRM, it's not a big problem.

Available online.