I'm looking into the EyeTV, as it seems like it would really suit my needs for school this year as my old TV at my student house has gone dead, and I don't want to bring another expensive piece of equipment (my LCD tv at home) there.

I was looking on the website, but I can't quite figure out what the major difference is between the EyeTV Hybrid and the EyeTV 250 Plus besides 250Plus including Toast.

http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/p...roduct2.en.html
http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/p...roduct2.en.html

I'm thinking the EyeTV Hybrid would work fine for me.

Anyone used either of these products? Recommend them?

Thanks!

(I searched, posts found were from 2005, so I'm thinking their products have changed since then )

Nevermind about the difference, I'm silly - it's on their website FAQ:

The EyeTV 250 Plus encodes analog video as it is imported into your Mac from the tuner, freeing your Mac of the effort of processing this signal. The Hybrid does not include this onboard encoding functionality and will simply pass along the video for your Mac's processor to deal with.

Question still stands about anyone using these

I've heard the Hybrid is really good. The plus seems even better in that it takes unnecessary processor use off your computer. But it seems like the plus is just a little less portable. It looks like something you have to have plugged in... whereas the hybrid looks more like a usb stick that can be tucked away. Since it is for use at college, I would consider how important portability is, plus the difference in cost.

I've used TV tuner cards on PC's before and they worked fairly good. I would compare those to these two and see how they differ. Like I said.. I've heard really good things about the eyeTV hybrid, but I've never actually used one, so I can't really give you much to go on.. sorry .

The USB stick looks a lot like a rebranded Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q which I am testing for quite some time extensively. So far, I am not impressed - quite the contradictory to be honest.

If you are planning to use analog television, I would definitely get the Plus as you have no idea how much power a PC needs to do real-time MPEG-2 encoding at a decent bitrate and decoding at the same time for doing timeshifting for example. With a hardware encoder card, you can do timeshifting even on a low-grade Celeron or Turion, while with a software encoder you need a dual core machine and still have like 60% CPU usage.
For ATSC, it doesn't make a difference which of the two you choose since ATSC comes encoded anyways. When you record something, the program will most likely simply write the MPEG transport stream to HDD without doing any post-processing. For ATSC SDTV, a PC that can play back a DVD is most likely suitable for watching TV as well.

One more thing - if the Hybrid really is a 950Q, I can tell you that that thing gets HOT!