SnapStream Blog

We recently found out that a Taiwanese magazine called Computer DIY did a feature article showcasing SnapStream’s Beyond TV. It is mostly a how-to guide on setting the software to watch/record two television streams simultaneously, but there is an interesting backdrop to the article…

Our in-house Chinese to English translator gave me this introduction to the article–a gentleman by the name of Mr. Chung does a lot of traveling between China and Taiwan. Apparently, TV outside of Taiwan is sub-par according to Mr. Chung’s standards, so he was looking for ways to watch content from his home country while abroad–specifically a ‘non-biased Taiwanese news broadcast’.

To keep a long story short, Mr. Chung is now able to stream video from his home in Taiwan through an Internet connection to his laptop or PDA using Beyond TV while traveling outside of Taiwan.

Sounds like a Beyond TV success story to me. Enjoy your news Mr. Chung.

Full Article (1 of 2)
Full Article (2 of 2)

Tom Wilson

A little past 11pm here in Seattle and I’m at the airport waiting for my red-eye back to Houston. Today was another great day at Gnomedex. Briefly, the highlights. Julie Leung delivered a eloquent, personal and moving presentation about how blogs are creating community and improving lives. I would have to say that she was the most talented and passionate speaker at the whole conference.

Another interesting session was the one on “Tomorrow’s Media” with JD Lasica, Terry Heaton, and Cory Bergman. I found Terry’s presentation to be the most interesting. Terry has been doing consulting work with WKRN-TV in Nashville, working with them to help them solve the problem of decreased revenues, in spite of record high ratings and viewership. WKRN-TV has been incredibly dynamic in acting to solve this problem with the launch of Nashville411 (an online yellow pages / portal / search engine for Nashville), RSS feeds for WKRN news and sports headlines and a variety of blogs (Big Joe’s Blog, Charlie411, a blog from their local weather department, and Nashville is talking). While Terry admitted that the impact of these efforts haven’t been closely studied yet since they were only started a few months ago, it’s still impressive to see a local broadcaster aggressively embracing the leading edge of media like this. Kudos to WKRN!

Finally, I wrapped up the day at dinner with the Wordpress users / developers and a bunch of other Gnomdexers. Dinner was great and I had a chance to hang out some with Matt, the founding developer of Wordpress, the open source software that powers this blog, and a fellow Houstonian. Houston’s lost him for now while he’s working in San Francisco for CNET, but I’m hoping that we’ll convince him to move back at some point. Houston needs more “Matts”.

So I’m in my hotel now, legs kicked up on the desk, relaxing after a pretty tiring day at Gnomedex (what else can you call an 8am to 11pm day?). One of the coolest things about coming to events and tradeshows, like Gnomedex, is meeting people who know and are excited about our products. Scott Trott came up to me tonight and introduced himself and said he wanted to tell me how great he thought Beyond TV was. He told me how he had bought Beyond TV Link, had a 300 GB hard drive full of Beyond TV recorded shows, and how he had used SnapStream.Net’s remote record feature to save the day when he realized (from an online live text feed he was reading) that a soccer game he had scheduled to be recorded at home was going to run into overtime. Scott is a great guy and we enjoyed talking about a variety of other different topics and ideas, but I had to share the SnapStream story.

I’m blogging live from Gnomedex at the Pier 66 in downtown Seattle. The main conference room where everything is happening resembles one of my college lecture halls, only bigger and lots more laptops. As Scoble noted, practically everyone at this conference has a laptop. Some have two like the guy sitting next to me, David Luebbert (in his case one Mac and one PC).

There were two presentations this morning — one from Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS, and one from the Microsoft team lead by Dean Hachamovitch. Dave’s presentation focused on OPML, a way to represent hierarchical lists. Dave’s presentation lacked a big picture and context (as evidenced by the audience member who asked Dave, during his Q&A, “What are you presenting??”), but nonetheless OPML sounds compelling for some of the same reasons that RSS is compelling — it’s simple, lightweight, and potentially applicable in representing a lot of different kinds of things.

The Microsoft presentation included the big RSS announcement that’s being written about all over the web. Basically, the announcements went something like this:

- that Longhorn will include platform components to organize RSS feed subscriptions
- IE 7 will include some native RSS capabilities
- Microsoft is creating an extension to the RSS format to handle lists (contrary to Dave Winer’s OPML approach) and the spec for the extension will be published under a creative commons license.

Obviously, RSS is going to be very big in IE7, in Longhorn, and likely in other Microsoft products as we head into the Longhorn timeframe.

Oh, I forgot to mention: at the end of Dave’s keynote, all the conference attendees (myself included — be thankful that you weren’t sitting next to me) joined together to sing “We all live in a yellow submarine.” Yes, it was fun.

Just a quick note that a new featured living room has been posted in our Digital Living Room Showcase.

Thanks to all those who have submitted photos so far. The response to this project has been great! I wasn’t so sure about incoporating Flickr at first, but looks like people have really taken on to it.

With the response so far, it seems like that the Digital Living Room Showcase may end up being an ongoing project for us, so keep those photos coming!

Digital Living Room Two (6/23/05)
Submitted via Flickr by: Torpdude

“My living room is so cool because: I have access to whatever media I want whenever I want it and my wife is still happy too.”

Components

Equipment:

• Dell 42″ EDTV plasma
• Sony DTS Receiver
• Polk Audio RM6005 satellites
• Quest Subwoofer
• Bell Expressvu
• Hauppauge MediaMVP

Snapstream Components:

• Server: DFI K8M800-MLV, A64 2800+
• BFG 6600GT OC
• M-Audio Revo 7.1
• (2x) Seagate 80Gb (Raid 0)
• 120Gb Maxtor PATA
• 160Gb Seagate PATA external
• PVR-250
• Sapphire Theatrix
• LG GSA-4163B
• Coolermaster ATC-620
• 27″ Sony Flat Trinitron
• USBUIRT
• BEV

Client:

• Biostar M7VIZ
• Sempron 2400+
• AIW 9600XT
• Chaintech AV710
• 30Gb Maxtor PATA
• LG GSA-4040
• Really crappy case and monitor
• Link

Client:

• Hauppauge MediaMVP w/ BTV plugin
• Dell W4200ED Plasma
• Sony DTS Receiver
• Polk Audio RM6005 Speakers
• BEV

I’m headed out to Seattle tomorrow evening to join 300 other geeks at Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex. I first met Chris at Comdex or CES many years ago (2001?) and I have to hand it to him for what he’s grown Gnomedex into. The line-up at this year’s show is exciting, good people from big companies and small companies alike. I’ll be rubbing shoulders with Robert Scoble (from Microsoft), Greg Reinacker (founder and CTO of Newsgator, a company we’ve partnered with to bring blogs to Beyond Media) and a bunch of other people in technology. If you’ll be there, drop me a line (my first name at snapstream dot com) or just find me at the show.

With all the capabilities Sony’s PlayStation® Portable (PSP™), it was only a matter of time until this unit became more than just a gaming system. It not only lets users take games, music, videos and photos on the road, but is also an excellent portable player for TV content recorded with our Beyond TV PVR software.

In this how-to article, I’m going to walk you through the steps to get TV shows recorded with Beyond TV onto your PlayStation Portable.
(more…)

Sooner or later, we’re going to have to start blogging about things more interesting that what we’ve added to our own website, but for the time being… Here’s another one.

We’ve been hard at work making improvements to the SnapStream website over the past couple of weeks and we pushed a bunch of those changes out about a week ago. We’ve

• added a Beyond TV product demo (featuring yours truly… to all of you that want to sign me up as the voice talent for YOUR next product demo, yeah, right. ),
• streamlined the Beyond TV product page,
• cleaned up the overall site navigation (added search to every page, de-cluttered the navigation on the top of the page by moving a bunch of navigation to the bottom of the page, added javascript drop-down menus) and
• cleaned up the frontpage (fewer links, new graphic on the frontpage, etc.)

Small things but a lot of work and there is more to come.

See the first of a series of SnapStream living rooms in our Digital Living Room Showcase. As mentioned in a previous post, the showcase will feature a series of living rooms using SnapStream Media products. A new living room will be highlighted about once every two weeks.

It’s not too late. Submit your living room today.

Featured Living Room One (6/9/05)
Submitted by: Percy Bell

Here is my current HTPC running Beyond TV and Beyond Media. It is a 4 tuner monster with over 1 TB of drive space. I have another 480 GB of drive space accessible over GigaBit from my BTV Link Box in the Bedroom. I use that box to store all my DVD’s while I record my TV on this one. I need alot of space to record the shows that I record on this box hence the large drives!

COMPONENTS:

• Beyond Media on my Panasonic PT-50LC13 50″ HDTV via RGB
• AMD XP2600+, 1GB, 1040GB HD, Running Dual PVR250 recording DirecTV and Dual "other" tuners
  recording "other" content.
• DSL Router, Wireless G Router, and GigaBit Switch
• Kenwood Surround Sound Receiver connected to my PC via SPDIF
• HD DirecTV Receiver
• Samsung HD DirecTV Receiver
• Direct TiVo used for Comparisons
• Kenwood Mini Disc Player/Recorder
• Sony 5 Disc DVD Changer
• Kenwood 200 Disc CD Changer
• Legacy Sony VCR (for old tapes)
• Xbox