The Tube for Mac

The GUI is really nice, but that's the only positive aspect about this. It crashes randomly in Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion. Nothing changed. So if you like crashes, lousy customer support and any kind of trouble: this app should be your choice. The most annoying thing is that this app is spying your keychain: if you don't allow access to the keychain, the app is not working. To me Equinux is the black sheep of the mac community: never had such a bad user experience with any other app/ developer

Version 10.1 is not (yet?) available for download on Equinux's site. So, don't bother.

Terrible, terrible software. It crashes randomly, the export feature doesn't work at all, and doesn't give useful error messages.

This is the worst product I have ever bought. Save your money. It is a pain to set up. I have a cable box so I only need channel 3 and it was a night mare to set up. After recording 3 shows it no longer opens. I dumped the prefs and was able to re register and watch what was in my library, but it will no longer see a channel and crashes when I scan for them. There is no way of setting it to record every week so you must enter all recordings manually. I have tried to download the software and reinstall but they send me a stationary pack instead. I even tried to set up the recommended 3rd party TV guide that cost extra $, but it too failed. Also there is no fast forward or rewind other than clicking on a small bar wher you may jump any where from 2 min to 6 minutes with the shortest click. i just want my money back.

I recently bought a Hauppauge USB stick that was bundled with TheTube and I deeply regret not having checked on the software first. Of all video/TV solutions I have used so far (which are quite a few) this is the worst. First of all, the software needs to be registered and activated online and is bound to a single hardware - if you want to use the software on another machine, you have to deactivate it for the current hardware first and activate it again on the other computer. This might be acceptable for a PCI card, but for a portable solution (what USB is usually supposed to be) this is nothing but a joke. Then the format of the recordings is more than proprietary - I have not found a single software except TheTube itself that can handle it. To export a recording to a usable format, you are forced to use one of only a handful of presets (e.g. for preparing videos to be watched on a computer with a decent screen size, there are only "Best Quality", "Smallest Size" and "Fastest Export"), none of them are explained anywhere in detail, none of them give any hint what the final video might look like or what size it will approximately have. After choosing the "right" preset, you are presented a mask to edit every detail of the video's metadata, but you are not able to select the range of the video you actually want to export (let alone cut out pieces in the middle, e.g. commercials) which means you have to use a second software to cut the exported video down to the final length. With a probability of about 80% the export works flawlessly; if not, the resulting video is unusable, TheTube reports an "unknown error" or TheTube crashes. Although the software looks shiny and Mac-like, it is IMO not very intuitive to use: e.g. the EPG is a simple list of thousand of entries with only very limited options to sort and filter and the timeshift feature is almost unusable due to the infinitesimal controls and entire absence of keyboard shortcuts. Last but not least, TheTube tends to be not as stable as a Mac user expects from a software - on my MacPro it crashes approx. once a week, sometimes taking one or two scheduled recordings with it.