To watch digital TV on you mac you first need some hardware to get a signal into your computer, then you need software to display it and record programs etc.

1. Firstly you need a USB TV tuner stick.
One end plugs into your USB port, the other end has an antenna socket where you plug the lead coming out of you antenna. So the antenna lead coming from your roof now plugs into you computer as if it was your TV.

It looks like this:

2. You then need to load up software, the EyeTV software is great, it has a setup assistant that will automatically tune the channels in for you, guiding you along the way like this:

3. Now you can Watch TV!

I found EyeTV to be a good solution for both the hardware and software. It records shows, you can watch them later and skip the adds. It comes with it’s own remote, but also works with the apple remote.

It has some nice tweaks too, so you can set the forward skip to be 30 seconds, so each press of the remote skips exactly 1 30 second advertisement, and then set the back skip to be 2 or 3 seconds to jump just that little bit back if you miss the start of the show again.

Not too hard to set up. When I did have problems, I emailed EyeTV support and they helped me within a day with my questions.

The macintosh will automatically wake up if it is asleep, record the program, then go back to sleep when it is finished. It can even power on from powered down to record a show if you want it to. This preference (start EyeTV when the device is plugged in) is the one that allows EyeTV to automatically wake up from sleep to record – it took me a while to work out!)

For $99 per year you can subscribe to IceTV, which allows you to have more detailed and up-to-date program information, and an iphone app that will allow you to tell your computer to record shows. I just used it for the 3 months for free and didn’t sign up as I found the recording not as reliable as directly from EyeTV.

Here’s a screenshot of the iphone program: