How to watch and record HDTV on your Mac

The new 24in iMac, with its huge screen and 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution is a fantastic computer for watching high definition video and TV broadcasts, but it's not the only Mac that can be used as an HDTV.

There are four things to consider if you want to watch and record HDTV on your Mac: screen size and resolution, processing power, a third party tuner and software, and storage.

Although the iMac is the only Mac with a built-in screen which is capable of displaying 1080i or 1080p HD signals without downsizing them, the 17in and 20in iMac and the 17in MacBook Pro have screens big enough to display 720p HDTV. If you have a Mac mini or a Mac Pro and want a display big enough to watch 1080 HD signals, you'll need to make sure that it has a native resolution of at least 1920 x 1080 pixels (the 1920-pixel horizontal resolution is necessary because HDTV broadcasts are in 16:9 widescreen format).

Next up, processing power, or to give it its technical name, grunt. Decoding the vast quantities of data that HDTV signals carry with them requires lots of grunt so you'll need a modern Mac to cope with it. At the very least, you'll need a Mac with dual G5 processors, which rules out all Mac minis and iMacs launched before January this year, and all PowerBooks and iBooks. Of the Intel Macs, all those with Core Duo or Core 2 Duo chips are fine, which means that the only Intel Mac that won't work is the Core Solo Mac mini, which has now been superseded. You'll also need 512MB RAM, preferably more, particularly if you want to do other things while watching or recording HDTV. You should also consider adding an extra hard drive to your set-up. HDTV eats up storage space and needs anything from 4 to 10GB per hour of programming, depending on how the broadcaster has encoded it. If you can add internal hard drives to your Mac, you'll save money, desktop space and power sockets doing it that way, otherwise external storage, connected by USB 2 or FireWire, is fine.

With all that hardware in place, it's time to choose a tuner and software combination. Essentially you have two choices; Elgato's EyeTV for DTT Hybrid which will tune both ATSC and NTSC signals, and Miglia's TVMini HD which is compatible with ATSC transmission. [NOTE: both these products are only available in areas where there are ATSC signals, ie North America, parts of Latin America and Asia, and Japan.] To make things easier, both devices use Elgato's excellent EyeTV 2 software to view and record HDTV.

If you want to watch both analogue and HDTV broadcasts, go for the Elgato tuner, otherwise there's virtually nothing to choose between them other than price.

Setting up both devices is easy: install the software, plug in the tuner and allow the EyeTV 2.0 app to automatically scan and tune into broadcasts. If you live in a strong signal area, the supplied antennae should be all you need to get going. If you live in an area where signals are weak and EyeTV has trouble tuning in, you may need to connect your tuner to an external antenna.

If you intend storing your recordings only for as long as it takes you to get round to watching them, storing them on your hard drive is fine — though you may want to back them up every now and again to another hard drive. However, if you want to archive recordings, you'll need to burn them to disc. Eventually, in the, hopefully not to distant future, this will mean HD-DVD or Blu-ray. For now though, it means DVD and a copy of Roxio'sToast Titanium 7. Toast allows you to burn your recordings to DVD using the DivX High Definition format, although you'll need a DivX certified DVD player to play them back. Storage on DVD is obviously much more limited than HD-DVD and Blu-ray will eventually be, so burning the whole of The Godfather onto one disc is out, but you should just about squeeze an episode of Law and Order or Without a Trace onto a dual-layer DVD.

And there you have it. With a fairly modern Mac, a few hundred bucks for the tuner and some storage, you've got everything you need to turn your Mac into an HDTV home theater.