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I have an old Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick (800e) that I would like to use to record and watch TV using an over-the-air antenna. I know that some people love EyeTV, but it's a bit expensive and not very configurable as far as I can tell.

The ideal software would have some or all of the below features:

  • Inexpensive (price of software and price of program guide (EPG) subscription)
  • Configurable recordings ("record every new episode of this show")
  • Automated commercial removal from recordings
  • Automated and configurable export of recordings (location, video format, file name based on program data)
  • Live TV or recordings streamed to other devices (Roku, iOS, web browser)

I'm in the US and am looking to watch OTA HD TV stations (ATSC).

Does this unicorn exist?

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No this unicorn doesn't exist. I was looking to revamp my MacMini/EyeTv setup earlier this year and looked around quite a bit at alternatives. What I found was that cable and dish DVR's have pretty much destroyed the computer hobby market for TV along with DRM licensing costs.

I think the closest you're going to get are the boxes from SiliconDust or Hauppage. Both have DVR and sharing abilities, but their software is a bit more high maintenance than EyeTV's to achieve most of your programming goals.

I finally decided to stick with EyeTV for my DVR and live viewing. Fingers crossed that they will keep the software updated. I use the TitanTV program guide to manually schedule recordings. EyeTV still does an excellent job of exporting programs for archiving. Good luck finding auto commercial removal, the last company to try that, Replay, was sued out of existence.

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  • Thanks for your answer. This was what I feared. I did see that there is some support for MythTV on Mac, but it seems to be only for the SiliconDust products. I was really hoping to accomplish something with existing hardware.
    – Dan Sinclair
    Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 21:44
  • The modern SiliconDust boxes convert the bits to a valid MPEG transport stream discoverable using uPnP. This means that for instance VLC can be used directly as a viewer, and that it is trivially simple to record a show in progress.
    – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
    Commented Feb 6, 2021 at 0:02

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