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I try not to be too picky. I really don't think my expectations of a TV tuner for a Mac are all that high. I've previously used two different TV tuners for Macintosh. In 1995 I first used the Apple TV Tuner that came inside the 6220 and 6320 Performas, and was also sold separately for use in the Performa line. The software used with this was Apple Video Player. While AVP was good, that is to say the audio matched up with the speakers' lips on screen and it had an intuitive interface, it had one small problem: the video was only viewable when your screen resolution was set to 640x480. In 1998 I got the XclaimTV external tuner for use with my ATI Xclaim VR card I had installed in my beige G3. It had all the ease of use that came with the Apple tuner, but it would work full screen while I had my resolution set high. I just checked ATI's site. Still no USB TV tuner. On the home page of Eskape Labs, makers of MyTV and its companion software EskapeTV Viewer, there is a quote out of the September 1999 issue of Camcorder & ComputerVideo Magazine which states: "Unfortunately, neither the iMac nor blue & white G3 mini-tower have any Composite or S-video input ports for video capture. To address that need, the new Avid Cinema for the Mac uses the USB port on either computer for video capture. It does this with an ingenious external USB video interface box..." It's because of this that I believe that it is likely not the hardware, but the EskapeTV Viewer software that is to blame for this product's poor performance. As we do for most products reviewed on big g media, we contacted the company that created the product that we wanted to review to ask for a review unit. Once Mason got the appropriate person on the phone, they told us that our "unit [was] being processed". That was about a month ago, and they now don't even return our email. I wonder if it has something to do with their product quality? I bought the thing. I thought I would just love it and would want to keep it anyway, so I bought it with my Apple Loan credit from a catalog store. I wonder if it's too late to send it back? I think someone's going to have an indigo Christmas this year.
 I plugged it into my powered USB hub (plugging it directly made no difference) after installing the supplied software and plugged the audio cable, messily located on the front end of the unit, into the microphone port on my iMac DV+. After setting up my channels with the "Auto-Tune" button on the EskapeTV Preset Manager window I started to watch TV and immediately noticed that people's lips were out of synch with their voices. I tried to switch channels by clicking on other channel selections on the Preset Manager window and found that they didn't switch, and got both audio static and a blue screen on many valid channels that after switching around a bit would eventually come in. It's this kind of erratic behavior that concerns me the most about this product. The logical thing to do would be to go to the Help Menu, ubiquitous in the Mac OS. No dice. EskapeTV Viewer doesn't even support Balloon Help. Fine. I instinctively check the web site, as usually a web site would be the place to find bug fixes, troubleshooting tips, and so forth. While there was an update from version 1.3 to 1.3.7 that didn't seem to affect the quality of playback at all. What finally did affect playback was the QuickTime 5.0 Beta. While previously the lips would be constantly be a second or two behind the sound, now they synch up, but the video stutters approximately every ten to fifteen seconds. Great.
I did of course eventually find the pdf manual in Eskape's folder. (It lies, btw, about what Command-1 and Command-2 do.) The Recommendations found there are: 1. Closing all applications, except EskapeTV or you third party QuickTime compatible capture application.Well yeah, I already did close everything else, but what's this about third party QT apps? Well, unfortunately it doesn't mean you can use Apple Video Player to watch TV. I tried. 2. Turn "Virtual Memory" off. From the "Apple" menu select "Control Panels" then "Memory". You will need to restart your system for the changes to take effect.Okay look, I've got 256 megs of ram up in this bad boy, why should I ever have to shut off virtual memory? Hello? It's 2000! Things work better using Virtual Memory. In 1995 my 75MHz machine could cope with synching audio and video through a TV tuner back when we were all using QT2.5! WTF!?! I tried it. It works. My video will remain jumpy however, cause I'm not going to restart every freaking time I want to watch TV--at the expense of ram performance in other apps, no less. Well, what about the rest of the thing?
 It's no more user friendly or bug free than Eskape's help files. The TV video doesn't always redraw after one of the two control windows has been over it. When the TV window is in the foreground, there is no way to change the channel, save using the up and down arrow keys to move to adjacent channels. Unlike Apple Video Player or the software that comes with XclaimTV, one cannot simply type the channel number in and hit enter.
 There is a little control window with a text field in it, but it works clumsily like any text field you might find on a web page form, allowing letters to be mistakenly entered, and necessitating that the previous channel entered be deleted by selection or by deleting the cursor back through the number. You can't go from full screen to minimum size in one keystroke, it depends on the system for volume control... I could go on, but you get the idea. Bottom Line: The hardware is probably fine, but the software is an early beta masqueraded as release quality foisted off on the unsuspecting consumer by a software company that doesn't seem to have it's house in order at least with respect to their QA or documentation departments. (hey, maybe it was the QA Department that eskaped! ;-) This software is an insult. I never thought I'd find something that cost this much that would receive such a poor rating, but here it is.
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Review: MyTV
