As I mentioned before, I'm cleaning out the office and found something that I've been putting off for far too long. The EvolutionTV by Miglia is a very cool little device. It's essentially a USB TV Tuner/DVR for OS X and it works extremely well. Is it a TiVo replacement? Absolutely not, but would make a great addition to your Mac mini multimedia set-up.

The DVR portion depends on a web-based interface called TitanTV to program recordings. The EvolutionTV also captures a short buffer and allows you to record, fast forward, and rewind live TV. Finally, the latest version allows TitanTV to act as an iChat broadcast system, meaning you can share video feeds etc. over the Internet using the same interface used by the iSight.

The box itself is tres sexy, with brushed aluminum hiding a relatively small circuit board. It requires a separate power supply and USB 2.0 port and encodes in MPEG-2/4 and DivX. The quality is relatively good for standard resolution and as you can see, it's a bit hard to get a signal in a basement using just a long wire. It's trivial to hook up a coaxial cable or S-Video to this thing for better quality.

It comes with a small remote and costs about $$230.

Product Page [Miglia]