there is an open source app called iTele (http://www.defyne.org/dvb/iTele.html) that supports a few tuners for viewing digital TV

this app mainly supports DVB-T devices for international use. the only ATSC device supported is the DVICO FusionHDTV 3 series pci cards.

eyeTV is a great app but not an end-all solution. my hauppauge hvr-950 has a software decoder so it lags unless you have one of the latest macs. with support for PCI cards with MPEG2 hardware decoders the CPU bottleneck wouldnt be an issue

LinuxTV is already ahead of OS X in terms of support for ATSC tuners

http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATSC_PCI_Cards

what i would love to see is the KWorld, air2pc, AverMedia, and Hauppauge PCI cards as they are widely available and fairly cheap


im not very knowledgeable in terms of programming but i thought maybe a topic could spearhead some development. i'd be willing to test drivers out if anyone wants to help.

You might be better off pushing for USB or firewire ATSC options, since none of the currently selling Macs have PCI slots (the Mac Pro has PCI-Express slots). The older Power Macs had PCI slots, but most of them don't have the horsepower to display HDTV.

Or, the HDHomeRun network device would be another excellent option. You can already play HD content from the HDHR via VLC. But, that's a pretty limited option.

I went with a Linux MythTV server which records all the HDTV programs, and plays it via the MythTV frontend on my Mac Mini. But, Linux/MythTV is pretty rough to set up.

well, there arent too many PCIe tv tuner cards to begin with on the market right now

personally as a G4 owner id rather have a PCI card, as i dont know if there are any USB/firewire models that have hardware encoders and QAM.

i would think since the creator of iTele got the Fusion 3 to work and there are already linux drivers for the kworld etc it shouldnt be too hard to get them workin with more support.

the hd homerun looks like a nice device....im definitely trackin the progress on mac support for that and may buy one in the future.

Yeah, not many PCIe tuners at all. Most new devices are going with USB instead.

No ATSC/QAM devices that I know of (PCI, USB, or Firewire) have hardware encoders. The HD content is already MPEG2 encoded for broadcast, so all the HD tuners do is get the data stream to the system. They also do not have SDTV MPEG2 encoders, they only have analog SD receivers, and rely on the CPU for any encoding.

The EyeTV 500 (Firewire) supports both ATSC over the air and QAM cable HD reception. Many, if not all, of the USB devices do too. The HDHomeRun supports ATSC and QAM, but does not support analog reception at all.