If you want to view your encrypted or digital cable channels-and I suspect most people would-you need to run an RF cable from your cable box's RF out to the EyeTV 200's RF in, and you'll still need to use your cable box's remote control to change channels. If you only want to view unencrypted analog cable channels, you can run your RF feed directly from the wall to the EyeTV 200 and change channels using the EyeTV remote. EyeTV features time-shifting functions to rewind and pause live TV, plus an onscreen program guide-if you have Internet access to pull up the Website. Simply connect the EyeTV box (the EyeHome's identical twin) to your Mac via FireWire and to your cable system via the RF connection, then load the EyeTV software. How about introducing home theater to your Mac? The EyeTV 200 can turn your Mac into a tuner/DVR unit through which you can watch and record your digital or analog cable signals. OK, you've introduced computer functionality into your home theater. If you're a Mac owner, this is an extremely easy, inexpensive way to acquaint yourself with multiroom and media-server functionality, as well as those dreaded computer terms that you've been trying to avoid. Once I got past the minor technical difficulties, I thoroughly enjoyed using the EyeHome. In a bizarre design choice, the front-panel LED lights up when you turn the unit off and goes dark when you turn it on, but this has supposedly been fixed in the new EyeHome model. Combine this with the lack of a consistent onscreen progress indicator that lets you know when the EyeHome is processing a command, and I often found myself accidentally canceling commands or going deeper into a menu than I intended. The remote's buttons were a tad too responsive. My review sample did have some minor quirks. But you know what? Once I got it working, my highly technical assessment was that this thing is pretty darn cool. Therein lies one frustration you must prepare yourself for when introducing computer functionality into your home theater-one errant setting in one computer can disrupt the entire network. Once I switched it off and rebooted the computers, I was able to access and jump easily between every Mac on the network without incident. After much investigation and a few choice exclamations, I found the problem: On one of the computers, the Internet Sharing function was turned on, and it was wreaking havoc on the network. A few times, I'd enter one Mac, only to find the contents of another. Sometimes I could sign out of one and enter another without a problem other times, I couldn't. The newly added Macs appeared in the Connect menu, but I couldn't consistently access any of them.
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