TV on my iMac

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Aug 26, 2009 | 08:59 AM

Scott in Houston

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From: Houston, duh

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TV on my iMac

Do you guys have a suggestion for the best piece of hardware to get my cable signal available for viewing on my iMac desktop?

I've seen a couple of these things in stores. The Coax cable feeds in and it converts to a format for watching on your desktop. I'm wondering how that works with cable, scrambled channels, and/or HD channels.

Anyone tried this?

Aug 26, 2009 | 11:32 AM

Simba

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Depends how you want to do it, either remote viewing or directly tuning the signal on the Mac.

For the former, just get a slingbox.

For the latter, eyeTV works pretty good.

I personally use a slingbox as I couldn't be bothered to run coax everywhere, and use DTV to boot.

Aug 26, 2009 | 11:43 AM

chokeu2

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I know several guys that are using Slingbox and love it.

Aug 26, 2009 | 01:54 PM

Scott in Houston

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Cool. You can get a live signal with slingbox? I thought it just recorded.
Thanks guys.

Aug 26, 2009 | 02:00 PM

chokeu2

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Yep! Last time I saw my buddy using his, he was watching live TV in the office. He was tuned into one of his TV's at home.

The catch is that you control that TV from Slingbox. So only one person can use that TV at a time.

Aug 26, 2009 | 02:06 PM

Scott in Houston

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Just reading about the slingbox. That seems sweet. I can't believe it requires a physical wire to connect to the network though. That is LAME. No wi-fi?

Aug 26, 2009 | 06:59 PM

Simba

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Scott in Houston

Just reading about the slingbox. That seems sweet. I can't believe it requires a physical wire to connect to the network though. That is LAME. No wi-fi?

It doesn't have WiFi as the boxes came out before 802.11n draft was in common use, and you need N for the kind of throughput that's required with video. As well, no wireless keeps the price of the box down.

If you need wireless on a slingbox, just use one of these.