Parallels Desktop & TV Tuners?

does anyone know if i were to buy a TV Tuner from eBay with a WinDVR3 software package... would that work

im running the latest version of Parallels desktop w/ a macbook pro from oct. 2008.... 4 gigs of ram, 256 vid card.

a reply would be great. thanks

 

Why??

Why not get a native tv tuner for Mac? I use eyeTV, it is great and not expensive at all. My rule of thumb is, only buy pc software if none are available on the Mac, and so far, I haven't had the need to do so, except for Visual Basic.

 

from what im seeing on ebay it is very expensive compared to the windows ones

can you tell me where you got yours? good price?

 

I have used an Adaptec dual tuner USB tuner and HDHomeRun (connects over Ethernet) in Windows Media Center running in Parallels. They record just fine, but of course you can't play back video in Media Center, though you can in Media Player. If you have a Media Center Extender to view the video, you can definitely use a Mac & Parallels and Vista or Win7 to record your TV shows.

The only question would be if there is enough disk performance to record 4 TV streams. I only tested if it would work, I didn't test it under full load on the Mac or the Windows side. It's only a few hundred dollars to build a real PC and use it as a dedicated DVR, but a Mac will work in a pinch.

I tested with a first generation 2.92GHz Mac Pro with 9GB of RAM (1GB to Vista) and a dedicated drive with only a Boot Camp partition.

 

Sarim,

EyeTV 500 receivers show up on eBay every so often. Great receiver -- I've bought several of them for family and friends and two for myself. Been using them for years without problems. The last one I bought was about $90 with the EyeTV 3 license. Make sure you're not getting one with EyeTV 2 software or else you'll have to send money to ElGato for the 3.x update. Rock solid Mac product.

 

The Mac specific EyeTV range of dongles are actually rebranded Hauppauge's WinTV products however include the EyeTV MacOS software.
(By the way they are not firmware locked and will also work in Windows if you download drivers from Hauppauge and the ugly PC viewer)

You can actually buy the PC WinTV HVR dongles and then buy the EyeTV 3.0 software separately if you want but that will cost you more.

By the way the PC versions do NOT work under virtualisation. They do work in Bootcamp as they need graphic acceleration.