SnapStream Blog

We’re working on a project that shows off living room systems powered by SnapStream Media products. We will launch a new page in the community section of our website in the near future that will feature a series of exceptional SnapStream living room systems.

If you’re a SnapStream Media user and you fancy showing off your SnapStream living room, then you can either email the items listed below to MyLivingRoom@snapstream.com or upload them to the SnapStream Living Room PCs group on Flickr.

Please include the following items with your submission…

- Photos of your living room setup with a minimum resolution of 800×600
- A short description of why your living room is just that cool
- A list of your hardware components
- A list of your SnapStream components

To Submit Via Flickr…

1. Login to or create a free Flickr account
2. Join the SnapStream Living Room PCs group
   (once you log in, click on “Your Groups” and search for SnapStream)
3. Upload your photos
4. Associate the photographs with the SnapStream group
   (click on “Organize”, then drag & drop your photos into the SnapStream group)

Here’s a sample of a Digital Living Room Entry…

(Submitted by: PBMax via Flickr)

To be considered as a feature living room in the first round of our digital living room showcase. Please submit your photos by Monday, June 6th.

Later today, I’m off to Computex in Taiwan with Soham. This isn’t the first time that I’ve been to Taiwan, but it’s my first trip to Computex so I’m looking forward to it. We have a meeting-packed schedule for most of the trip, but we’re hoping to squeeze in some time to browse the floor and see some of the new product announcements that are getting buzz like AOpen’s Intel-based Mac-mini look-alike. If you’ll be there and are interested in meeting up, drop us a line at partners [AT] snapstream [DOT] com.

Beyond TV’s Web Admin has always been a way for more advanced users to really get under the hood of Beyond TV and fine-tune the software. The Web Admin functionality ranges from mundane things like creating new video folders (so you can store TV shows on different disks or folders on your PC) to more advanced things like configuring the number of bidirectional (interpolative) frames per group in an MPEG-2 stream for a particular MPEG-2 video quality (I like to pretend like I know what that means). Today, we posted an update to the Beyond TV help file that includes a new section on the Web Admin settings for advanced users. Browse the new documentation or search it from the homepage of the website.

Beyond Media with Firefly PC Remote
We’ve been working on combining some of our products here at SnapStream Media to deliver a more complete media center experience for our consumers. I guess, in a way, we’ve been doing this for quite some time already by selling bundled solutions in our online store.

Now we’ve taken it a step further by including a PC remote with the Beyond Media retail package. I mean after all, our products were designed to be used in a living room setting, so why not provide a remote control to go along with them? What’s better is that it’s the Firefly PC Remote we decided to put in AND we’ve lowered the price for the combination! (Hey…perfect gift for Grads or Father’s Day!)

For the time being, you can still get Beyond Media on its own as a download in the SnapStream Online Store.

Medusa PVR
Ok, so I know the Medusa PVR, which was covered by PVRBlog, eHomeUpgrade and Engadget, is old news. BUT what you may not know is that we’ve started selling a do-it-yourself Medusa package in the SnapStream Online Store. There are actually two choices to choose from.

For those who are brand new to SnapStream, we offer a Medusa PVR bundle that comes with Beyond TV, three PVR-500 dual-tuner cards and enough TV tuner licenses to get you going. For you veteran SnapStreamers out there, who have been using Beyond TV since before it even became cool, we have a bundle for you with just the tuner cards and TV licenses, sans Beyond TV.

So get those little screwdrivers out and start opening your PCs, I see a fun BYO-Medusa project happening in your near future.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the FCC’s mandate that all digital receivers (includes PC tuner cards) honor the broadcast flag today. News.Com has the story. This is a big win for technology and everyone that cares about digital rights.

I’m no lawyer, but I’ll try to give a quick synopsis about what all this means. First of all, normal TV, the kind we’ve had since TV was invented, is analog. Over the last decade, like all things, TV has been slowly going digital and there’s a run on HD TV’s before the Super Bowl every year.

Since the broadcast spectrum is a protected resource, it is regulated by the FCC. Well, in a post-Napster world, content providers are worried that their unencrypted, free and clear, over-the-air content will be captured, perfectly duplicated, and mass distributed. They lobbied the FCC to require that all digital TV receivers honor the broadcast flag – a flag in the stream that tells the receiver how accessible to make the content. The FCC ruled that post July 1st, all tuner cards and related software (like Beyond TV) would have to be redesigned to support the broadcast flag – a big headache and a big cost.

Well, several consumer groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been arguing that the FCC has no right to force technology manufacturers to make their products a certain way. Today, the courts agreed with them. What will happen in the end remains to be seen. There still remains the chance that the ruling will be appealed or that Congress will get into the fray.

As far as SnapStream goes, we are definitely working on over-the-air digital support and are watching all of this very closely. Our current work focuses on supporting digital tuner cards that are already available or similar to those already available. These cards do not support the broadcast flag, so it’s good to hear that our efforts thus far won’t be wasted. Of course, this probably isn’t the end to the content protection issue, so we will keep watching it and may still have to adjust our software later to be able to support the next generation of digital tuner cards. As far as the release of an HD version of Beyond TV goes, we have not yet determined all of the details. So look for more information in the coming weeks once we finalize our plans. But rest assured HD is coming. I’m anxious to set it up at home myself!