EyeTV Utilities
About EyeTV
The Elgato EyeTV 500 is a FireWire device that plugs into any G4 or G5 Mac OS X system to view, timeshift, and schedule recordings of free over-the-air HDTV broadcasts. It's truly a plug-and-play solution, and it even works well with laptops while traveling.
Auto-Tuner Report
When auto-tuning the EyeTV 500, the user interface does not provide much information about the signals it's finding. It does save a log that contains the signal strength for each frequency it tried, but mapping those frequencies to actual channels is left as an exercise for the reader.
This PHP script was written to parse the auto-tuner's log and map the frequencies to actual channels. It uses a mapping file to provide additional information about the channels, and then displays the results in a color-coded table.
To use the script, download it and place the decompressed folder in your Sites directory. You must have Personal Web Sharing turned on, and PHP needs to be enabled (instructions).
By default, the script looks for the EyeTV Archive folder in
your Library folder. This means that these folders must be
readable by the web server; the easiest way to do this is to Get Info on
each of the two folders and change the "Other" permission to "Read Only".
Note that this makes your Library folder readable by other
users on the machine; if you don't trust the other users of the machine,
you may need to copy the log file elsewhere and modify the PHP script
to look there instead.
Once Personal Web Sharing is on and the permissions are correct, you can view the tuner report by pointing your browser to:
http://localhost/~username/autotuner/report.php
Replace username with the name of your user account.
The list of channels is specified by the stations.csv
file. This is a comma-separated file with no header row, and the
following fields are expected:
Actual Channel
Logical Channel
Callsign
Network
City
Direction (in degrees)
Distance (in miles)
Digital (TRUE/FALSE)
The included file is for stations in southern California; you'll want to edit it to provide your own station data. You can find this data at sites like AntennaWeb. Note that if you create a CSV file using Microsoft Excel on Mac OS X, you'll need to convert the line endings from the classic Mac format that Excel still uses to the UNIX format that PHP expects. SubEthaEdit can do this for you.
Perhaps someday a nice Cocoa application will be written that downloads channel definitions from the Internet and parses the log without requiring PHP. This was merely a quick-and-dirty project.