It seemed like a simple project: use a spare Mac to record TV off the cable and play it back on my big screen.

After a few weeks of turmoil, I’ve spent more time futzing with the setup than I have watching the stuff I recorded. Tonight I plan to record Dancing With the Stars and hope to have it ready to watch by tomorrow night. I’m not too optimistic, though.

We’ve had DirecTV and then Dish Network, both of which I dropped because of the cost. They’re just not worth it for someone who watches very few programs: Mythbusters, Nova sometimes, Masterpiece Theatre a few times a year. And of course Dancing With the Stars if my wife is not home to watch it live.

We had a PVR, which worked fairly well, but it really bugged me that I had to leave the recordings on the drive. There was no way to archive them off onto a DVD. So shows that we wanted to keep and share with friends eroded away our 100 hours of disk space. Of course I eventually got them archived by removing the drive from the PVR and sticking it a Linux machine, but that’s not something I wanted to do regularly.

Rather than TV shows, we watch movies. DVDs from Netflix look great on our InFocus 4805 projector. Maybe the image on my 8-foot screen is not as sharp as a 4-foot plasma, but I like it just fine and it costs thousands of dollars less. If I could just watch the occasional TV show without enduring the insolent insipidity of a VCR, I’d be all set.

The projector accepts video from a standard RGB computer output, but I’ve never been able to get it to look right. My G5 (1.6 ghz single processor) has two video outs, so I can use the computer display for setup and throw the TV shows onto the projector. But it just doesn’t look right. Fuzzy. Cheap. And I had to run the video all the way to the ceiling-mounted projector because I couldn’t (or didn’t know to) run the signal through my Denon home theatre receiver.

So I bought an AppleTV. Why not? I own at least one of just about every Apple product (do you own an iPod Hi-Fi?) and one can always use another trophy for the collection. I also got an EyeTV Hybrid tuner and a Turbo 264 hardware encoder.

To be fair, the AppleTV is not touted as a companion for a projector; rather, it prefers to couple with an HD television that has HDMI or component connections. But my receiver accepts component inputs, so the setup seemed ideal.

To reiterate, the plan was this: I’d use the computer KVM to schedule recordings, and watch them on the projector by switching the receiver’s input to the AppleTV.

I’d like to recount all the problems I had but there’s no way I can remember them all. Let’s start with the EyeTV products.

EyeTV 2.5 is the application that works with the little USB tuner to record and play content received over the TV cable. I expected that the app would let the Mac sleep and wake it when it’s time to start recording. It didn’t, so now I have to leave the G5 on all the time–an energy waste that I’m rather ashamed of. (As far as I can tell, claims that EyeTV wakes a sleeping Mac refer to its ability to wake a spun-down hard drive–a far cry from true sleep and nothing to brag about).

EyeTV doesn’t record programs into a nice neat .mpg file. No, it saves recordings to a package of 4 or 5 files that look proprietary to me. There’s an .mpg file in there, but it won’t open in Quicktime Player or MPEG StreamClip. Nope, to encode the recording so AppleTV can play it, you have to use the export facility of EyeTV.

That wouldn’t be so bad, except for the poor implementation of this function (and just about every other function) in EyeTV. I cannot tell EyeTV to assume I want every recording to be exported; I have to remember to set the export option every time I select a program to record. Thereupon EyeTV will dutifully encode the file and export it to iTunes, leaving behind an extra copy of the encoded file in my Movies folder. That is to say, when I tell EyeTV to export a recording to AppleTV, it creates the encoded file and places it in my iTunes library as it should, but also leaves an extra copy of that 1 or 2 gig file in my ~/Movies folder.

To be precise, it does so when it finishes the encoding without crashing, which is a little more than 50% of the time. When it crashes, it gives no notice that it’s hung, and in fact it keeps exercising the processor and gobbling up all available RAM. Because encoding is so slow, even with the accelerator dongle, it’s not always obvious that the app has hung. And what a hang: you have to reboot to get it going again. It will not respond to Force Quit. And then you have to manually go hunting for the half-baked files it has left behind and remove them lest you lose a gigabyte or two or disk space.

The process of encoding for AppleTV does not remove the original recording file, about 2 gig for a one-hour program. So, even when EyeTV encodes without crashing, it still leaves behind around 3 gigabytes of files that I have to remove manually.

By the way, even with the USB accelerator running, it can take up to 2 hours to encode a 1 hour video.

Well, I got all that going, and guess what? The video looks shoddy on my projector. Fuzzy, crummy, bad. Clearly something is not configured correctly (or the products I bought are just junk, a hypothesis that I still consider open).

So where is the problem? The projector? It has settings for 16:9, Letterbox, 4:3, and Native ratios. I tried all combinations. And I ran a high quality component cable to it from the receiver. What about the receiver? It has no adjustments that I’ve found relevant, and I hope it’s not doing something wacky with the signal. The AppleTV? It has settings for screen resolution, none of which make any difference as far as I can tell (the projector downsamples or whatever it’s called as necessary).

Or EyeTV? Hmm. EyeTV has a handy export configuration for AppleTV. I would expect this configuration to use a resolution of, say, 640 x 480 for 4:3 or 640 x 360 for 16:9. In fact, according to what I have read, the format is supposed to be “5 Mbps max., 800×600 max., 30 fps max.” But what the AppleTV setting provides, according to the export dialog box, is this: “H.265/AVC, 352 x 480, 29.97 fps.” This is because that’s the best quality recording I can get from a single-processor G5. 640 x 480 requires a dual G5 or Intel Mac. Could that be why my recordings are fuzzy? I wish I knew.

I don’t why I’m getting lousy results or whether the results can be improved, and I’m too weary to look further.

In a few days, Leopard will arrive. I plan to reformat the drive and do a clean install of everything. Maybe that will salvage something usable out of the ton of aggravation I’ve experienced. And in any case, I suppose I ought to install EyeTV on my MacBook Pro and see if I get 640 x 480 recording and whether that looks better than the G5′s 352 x 480. In which case I would need to buy a Mac Mini so why did I buy that AppleTV?

More trouble than it’s worth. Definitely.