SnapStream Blog

The Firefly PC remote was featured on the David Letterman show! Cool. Of course, it was sans the SnapStream and Firefly logos, but oh well. The sketch was very Letterman-esque humor about a “revolutionary” voice activated remote control technology. No, we aren’t adding voice recognition technology to Firefly anytime soon. But if we were, just think of the possibilities for karaoke using your SnapStream entertainment PC… (for the record, it’s actually not such a crazy idea to add voice capabilities to a remote control)

P.S. kudos to wheemer for pointing this out to us.

As of last week, we starting shipping the Diamond PVR-600 USB2 TV tuner in the SnapStream Store. We’re excited about this new TV tuner for a bunch of reasons. First, I’ll run you through the basic specs on the card — the Diamond PVR-600 is a USB2 analog TV tuner with an MPEG-2 hardware encoder. The MPEG-2 hardware encoder means you get high quality TV recordings without taxing your PCs processor (ie all the heavy lifting of encoding is done by the TV tuner, not the processor on your PC). But these things don’t set it apart from other USB2 hardware encode TV tuner cards. What sets the PVR-600 apart are two things:

1) It’s bus-powered: this means that the device doesn’t require a separate power adapter — it gets all the power it needs from its USB connection to your PC. This may not seem like a huge deal, but it does make the card a lot easier to install and use. Let’s face it — everyone’s powerstrips are already pretty crowded and to add another power connection can be annoying. It’s also one less point of failure — you don’t have to worry anymore about the power adapter getting unplugged.

2) It has a great form factor: The PVR-600 is nice and small — slightly larger than a deck of cards. This makes it easy to tuck away in your living room, behind your home theater PC. Or if it’s visible in your home theater system rack, it’s a pretty good looking, svelte piece of hardware.

And like other TV tuner cards that we sell in the SnapStream store, the PVR-600 has been thoroughly tested with Beyond TV so you can expect it to “just work” with your PC when you install it.

The PVR-600 is available bundled with SnapStream Beyond TV or standalone.

One of the things that we’ve been working on adding to our website for the past couple of months is a high quality integrated search. We evaluated a bunch of options, some hosted, some software. None of them worked that well. The biggest problem I had with most of the solutions we looked at were ranking of search results — most of them were intuitively bad at ranking results.

About a month ago, I came across the perfect solution — the Google Mini. It took me about 15 minutes of reading about this thing before I was at the buy page ordering one.

With the new Google Mini-powered search box on the frontpage of our website, all of our web visitors can search all of our web resources, whether it’s one of the hundreds of knowledgebase articles, thousands of forum postings or any page on www.snapstream.com. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Our first foray into a SnapStream company blog! Watch this space for company news, product plans, specials in our online store and who-knows-what-else.