(You can skip the prologue if you’re not interested in the customer service story!)

For Christmas 2008 I received an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid TV tuner from my wife. Getting it set up properly was a nightmare, but I finally did it. Tech support wasn’t a help, and my own computer geekiness and a little extra free time over Christmas break was all I had to rely on. Turns out that it might have just been a defective tuner.

So when I recently moved and found more problems tuning channels, I had enough. I contact EyeTV’s support for a possible RMA (despite being out of warranty) and referenced the original support ticket I had created over a year and a half ago. I braced myself for a long fight….and got a huge surprise.

They sent me a cordial apology and a promise to replace my tuner. Just like that! Talk about stellar customer service.

 
If that weren’t good enough…here’s what I think about the tuner:

It tunes channels well. With QAM support since 2008, you can pull in free HD signals over just about any cable connection, or free HD channels from over-the-air sources. If you’ve got ultra-cheap basic analog cable still, it will pull that in too. Perhaps where it most shines is the integration with the EyeTV software.

EyeTV since version 3 has been awesome. It’s simple to pause, rewind, record, convert, and burn TV shows and movies. You can also grab an app and extend support to your iPhone or iPod Touch. Get yourself the free comskipper plugin and it will automatically remove commercials from your recordings. Download cyTV and you can stream your live TV to another computer on your network, or even across the web! (Think of it as a poor man’s slingbox)

I won’t run through all the features, but retailing at $80, EyeTV 3 is a tremendous value-add to buying the EyeTV Hybrid. Consider the great customer service mentioned above, and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed!

I finally got some satisfaction to a longstanding annoyance today. You see, with Firefox on Windows, you can view webpages in full screen–no taskbar, no chrome, just full view web. On a Mac? No dice. I’m serious, it’s just plain impossible to do…or it was. Some online video services make your browser magically take over the whole screen (like hulu.com), but many don’t. Today, the problem was ESPN360.com.

Given that Apple is totally lame in not giving Safari a fullscreen mode, and that Firefox still hasn’t implemented it yet, I went looking for other solutions. After all, I wanted to watch ESPN360.com on my TV, hooked up to my Mac Mini, and all that chrome was annoying as heck.

So I did some searching once before and found…nothing. Today, somehow I got the Google Query right, or found the right forum, and ended up with megazoomer. That’s right, no more lame zooming tricks (like this), although those are ok for sites that don’t offer a ‘fake’ fullscreen mode.

The only drawback is that this only works for Cocoa apps, so you’ll have to use Safari. The plus is that it works for ANY Cocoa app! Wohoo, no more permanent, unmoveable, unhidable toolbar!

What are you waiting for? Go start watching free online TV in real fullscreen today!

If you have comcast, like me, and thus can’t watch ESPN360 at all…there is a way around it: watch ESPN360 on Comcast.

Tonight, Season 4 begins, in High Definition . I’ve been waiting for this moment for SOOO long! Will you be watching?

2 Hours of action! If you haven’t been keeping up with the “intermediate” story, head on over to find815.com and work your way through it quickly. Also, over on the LOST webpage there’s a quick recap (8:15 long!) of seasons 1-3 if you’re a little bit fuzzy. (Click on “Lost recap in 8 min 15 seconds”)