, blog about the 
I've been using EyeTV 2 for the past few years with my iMac G5 / TwinhanDTV Alpha digital TV tuner combination, and since then I have not looked back. The convenience of pre-recorded digital TV means that I avoid watching live TV nowadays. I much prefer watching the shows I have recorded at a time of my choosing, and with the option of skipping those annoying ads. But as good as EyeTV 2 is, it was missing what I consider to be an essential feature- the ability to create a list of TV shows that you want to have recorded in future, no matter when the shows are broadcast. Eg. a list of titles/keywords that can be run against the EPG, with the resulting matching programmes automatically scheduled for recording. If I want to record each weekly episode of Good Game, and all Columbo movies that happen to be broadcast at obscure times, then I shouldn't need to manually scan the EPG and schedule everything myself.
Thankfully, Elgato's EyeTV 3 provides a solution to this problem in the form of smart guides. A long-overdue feature, smart guides are highly-configurable and work as advertised. Smart guides can be created to simply record all future shows matching a particular title, or more complex smart guides can be designed to use a combination of fields such as repeat, channel, director, year, description and more. So it is easy to schedule a series for recording on a particular channel based on its name, with recordings limited to non-repeats only, and keeping a maximum of three recordings. Precisely what I was looking for. Of course there are many other new features in version 3, but for me, the inclusion of smart guides alone makes the US$39.95 upgrade for EyeTv 2 users an essential purchase. In fact, somewhat of a bargain I would say...
(image from elgato.com)
