Bryan Williams

Fixing the lag with Elgato EyeTV and Nintendo Wii

Posted: September 2nd, 2010 in Tutorials. No Comments

I  came across this tip on a Youtube review for running a Nintendo Wii on iMac using Elgato EyeTV. But since I can’t remember what video it was and have yet to find the solution on any website or forum, I decided to repost it. Hopefully I can save someone else the couple hours it took me to solve the lagging issue with Nintendo Wii running over Elgato EyeTV for Mac.

Using  default settings there will be a couple second lag between when you wave the controller and what appears on thescreen. It’s frustrating but there is an easy fix for it:

EyeTv > Preferences > Devices > Analogue > Enable Timeshift (uncheck)

I’m surprised it isn’t documented very well on forums or tutorials.  I forgot about this last week when we formatted our hard drive and reinstalled everything. I knew there was a trick so I searched up and down the net with Google. I messed around for hours with different combination of deinterlace settings. I knew there was a trick for it and Googled up and down but couldn’t find out exactly where the setting was. So there you go, if you have a couple seconds lag on Nintendo Wii on your Mac using Elgato EyeTV, give that a try.

While I’m on the subject I have to say we absolutely love our Elgato EyeTV. We don’t have a television in our place and use our iMac for just about everything. We wanted a Nintendo Wii for a long time but didn’t want to purchase a television and all the associated costs with it. So last Christmas we picked up the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid and have loved it. We play Wii on our Mac all the time and works perfectly. We are able to access basic channels and have even recorded a few episodes of Public Television for our son to watch over and over on the iMac. The iPhone app and remote apps available for it are awesome. Something really cool about watching live television from iPhone. No need for a television and the USB device will move up with us when we upgrade our computer down the road.