EyeTV - iphone 4

EyeTV

 

 £2.99/$4.99 Watch TV remotely

People pay good money for a SlingBox, a piece of hardware that sits at home and streams TV over the internet to a computer or smartphone, Now, your Mac can do the same thing. Add any TV tuner that uses Elgato's fantastic EyeTV application, then install this app on your iPhone.

You can watch live TV and play, pause and rewind it, You can do it on the same local network or even over the web. Only a few routers make the link automatically, but with a little port forwarding on our test Netgear model, we were all set. Quality over the web depends on your broadband's upload speed, or whether you're on 3G, If you own a Turbo,264 HD - Elgato's video encoding dongle - it can switch bitrates on-the-fly to give the best quality as bandwidth changes. Live TV streaming requires a Core 2 Duo, but we had some success using a 1.5GHz Core Solo with a Turbo.264 HD,

You can watch recordings you've made through EyeTV on the Mac, and go through the schedules to mark future programmes for recording remotely. Sadly, there's no way to search.

The app works well, though your experience of watching live TV and recordings remotely could be spoiled if your home broadband upload speeds aren't generous. For scheduling and watching recordings, EyeTV is great, but we used TVCatchup. com for live TV wherever we were.