SnapStream Blog

In a move that is sure to please many PVR users, NBC recently announced plans to stop scheduling programming off the hour in an effort to increase viewership in the upcoming fall season. For the last couple of seasons, NBC has used strange scheduling (such as programs starting or ending at 9:02) in an effort to lock viewers into its prime time lineup. Unfortunately for PVR users, this scheduling caused conflicts when trying to record back to back shows on different channels. Many users reported coming home to find that a 32 minute long “Joey” (or other NBC program) had caused shows on other stations to not record due to conflicts on the tuner.

While the decision to stop this practice is only a small piece of NBC’s overall programming strategy, it has a large and positive impact on the PVR community. It will be interesting to see if other broadcasters learn from this and decide to keep there programming at regular intervals, especially as PVRs become more common in the average household. In the mean time, we can keep our fingers crossed.

Amanda Congdon has a tough time finding something to watch on television in her latest video blog: “Check out channel five thousand eight hundred and twenty-one.”

Hello everyone! This is going to be the first installment of a SnapStream Q&A session that we’ll be running every so often. Our goal here was to establish a way for our customers to engage us directly with some questions and provide some straight up answers to all of our valued customers about anything that you might be curious about. I think it will be a very valuable experience and I hope our readers do too. With that said, let’s get started!

Will SnapStream be integrating Beyond TV and Beyond Media?

The answer to this question is a definite yes!

Here’s how the timeline looks today. Beyond TV 4 is the next product release from SnapStream. It’s a direct upgrade to previous versions of Beyond TV that adds support for high definition recording and playback, as well as FM Radio, DivX support, and a whole lot of spit and polish.

Following the release of Beyond TV 4, we will be porting the ViewScape interface of Beyond TV to the Beyond Media architecture. Beyond Media is built on our next generation and highly extensible media shell foundation, most of which we make available today to developers in the Beyond Media SDK. Porting Beyond TV’s user interface under that architecture will provide a great unified experience for our users.

Only the user interface of Beyond TV needs to be ported to Beyond Media. The server components of Beyond TV will remain the same and will not need to be ported to unify the two applications. In layman’s terms, the guts of Beyond TV that do all of the recording and post processing won’t be changing at all, just the look and the integration. Again, much of this is due to the architecture and excellent server and client side separation in Beyond TV, which developers can access using the Beyond TV SDK…a powerful development platform for customizing and controlling our PVR technology.

What does unifying the two products get you? In addition to a more elegant and seamless experience, you’ll get the ability to plug in new skins and cool additional features (like the DVD Library and Movie Showtimes browser) that have been created by dedicated community members to further enhance your media center experience. Because Beyond Media is based on an Avalon/XAML like model (the presentation technology that Windows Vista is building towards), developers can create all kinds of cool and uniquely home theater like effects in their HTPC applications.

Finally, as we’ve mentioned in our original announcement, if you own Beyond TV 4 and Beyond Media, getting the fully integrated product will be a free upgrade for you when integration is complete. It’s our way of saying thanks to our customers!

What are your plans for high definition support?

We have been testing high definition support for a few months now, and I feel confident in saying we will have excellent support for high definition cards in Beyond TV 4. I won’t mince words…setting up your home entertainment rig for high definition capture can be a small project. But with SIX times the resolution and pure digital clarity, we know many of you are waiting with bated breath for the chance to dive in and explore a whole new world of digital entertainment.

At the beginning of the year I played with many different solutions (probably better classified as hacks) for playing back high definition streams in preparation for bringing this feature to market. The main thing that struck me was how hard and difficult it was to do something simple like capture and play back high definition content. I literally dug through hundreds of posts with many different and lengthy guides that would hack together components and different applications just to accomplish some of what, in my mind, should have been very simple things.

I’m very glad to say that we’ve got the necessary expertise here at SnapStream to do this type of thing RIGHT. We’ve spent thousands of man-hours writing new components from the ground up to handle all of the special requirements for HD support. We’ve also been in the testing process with a group of very dedicated folks who are beating up the product in their own living rooms today and giving us their valuable feedback. That’s why we believe that you will find a much simpler and more elegant approach to high definition support in Beyond TV than you’ve been used to seeing.

One specific question that comes up often is our support for different types of HD. Over the air broadcast cards (antenna) and QAM capture cards (basically, cable HD) are the two types of HD support most people are interested in. Satellite HD is a closed system and one that currently cannot be supported without additional work in the ecosystem.

Our initial release of Beyond TV 4 will support over the air (OTA) capture cards. QAM support is something that we are watching closely and will implement as soon as is feasible.

QAM capture is in a state of flux right now when it comes to the marketplace. As some of our users already have pointed out, it’s an area when some standardization needs to be built into the OS before general support can be introduced. In general, we watch for some standardization because this market is moving very quickly and our efforts are best spent working on lasting solutions for our customers.

However, there is a balance between how easy the support is to implement and how proprietary it is. Our plan right now is to deliver solid OTA high definition first. Here’s why.

• 1. Having solid over-the-air high definition support is required before we can extend support to QAM. The software infrastructure required is similar, so refining over-the-air support in the product drives both features forward.
• 2. It would be silly for us to hold back over-the-air support from those customers that can use it today.

Once Beyond TV 4 is released, we’ll be taking a good hard look at QAM to see if we can create a solution that makes sense for our customers. Please continue to give us constructive feedback on this issue!

I’d like to thank all of our customers again for giving us the opportunity to answer some of the questions that have been on your minds. We got far more questions than we could actually answer in this first installment… but we will continue to do this Q&A on a regular basis and get to more questions! You can ask us new questions by posting to our new Q&A forum.

Richard Kuo
Chief Technology Officer

SnapStream Media will release Beyond TV 4 in the next few months. Beta users have already started seeing some of the upcoming features under the codename “Retro.� But until now, it’s all been very hush, hush. In general, at SnapStream, we like to stay quiet about new releases until beta users have had a chance to give us significant feedback. Well, the verdict is in, and things are looking very good. Three big ticket items slated for Beyond TV 4 are FM Radio support, DivX support, and HDTV!

Yes, HDTV. We’ve already got this up and running in our office lounge and the difference is simply unbelievable especially on our plasma TV. It’s six times the picture quality, two and a half times the audio channels with Dolby surround sound, and countless new camera angles, all in one easy-to-use product. If you’re wondering about the camera angles, you should have seen the digital broadcasts of the summer Olympics last year.

A select group of beta users have already started putting HD support through the paces at home and have really helped us create an HD PVR product that everyone can use. So a shout out to them and a big thanks for all of their early feedback. In my opinion, the coolest thing is that with Beyond TV’s built-in multiple tuner and multiple lineup support, I can simply add a digital tuner to my existing setup. I will still get all my analog content and be able to surf through all of my digital and analog stations in one seamlessly integrated program guide.

Out of the gates, Beyond TV 4 will support several over-the-air ATSC tuner cards. Some of the cards that we’re already testing with our software include:

AVerTVHD A180
(http://www.aver.com/products/tvtuner_avertvhd_mce_a180.shtml#2)
HDTV Wonder
(http://www.ati.com/products/hdtvwonder/index.html)
VBox DTA 151 and USB-A 3560
(http://www.vboxcomm.com/product3.htm)
Fusion HDTV 3
(http://www.fusionhdtv.co.kr/ENG/Products/).

We’ve also been running the software on ATSC reference designs by Conexant and Phillips, so there are probably many other cards that Beyond TV 4 will automatically support.

A quick note about DivX support. Beyond TV 4 will not only support ShowSqueeze to DivX, but will also enable watching live TV and recording direct to DivX from software encode cards. It will also support Plextor’s DivX based hardware encode cards. Through our partnership with DivX, Beyond TV 4 will bundle the necessary encoders and decoders so you can get up and running with DivX just as easily as you can with MPEG2 or WMV today.

Anyone who purchases Beyond TV 3 starting today through the Beyond TV 4 launch will get a free upgrade to Beyond TV 4 when it releases. We haven’t finalized the upgrade pricing for existing users just yet, but we will have more information closer to the launch.

Obviously, another item on many users’ minds is complete integration of Beyond Media and Beyond TV into one application. We are well aware of this and are working on it for a release after Beyond TV 4. Users who own both Beyond TV 4 and Beyond Media will be able to upgrade to the fully integrated product for free when it is released.

As you can see there are a lot of cool things in the pipeline from SnapStream and Beyond TV. So definitely stay tuned (hehe) for continued updates and information on Beyond TV 4!

Engadget is reporting that the next version of Windows, formerly code named Longhorn, has now been officially named “Windows Vista”. Presumably this name was picked to associate our choice in operating systems with pleasant visions of rolling hills or mountainous landscapes.

Interestingly enough, the name “Windows Vista” was chosen after months of research determined that people were turned off by the names “Windows Monthly Security Patch Edition” and “Windows You-Have-To-Buy-This-Anyway-So-We’ll-Name-This-Whatever-The-Hell-We-Want Edition”.

OK enough joking around. Seriously, we love Windows and this is a big step forward for Redmond. Congratulations to the Longhorn team!

As podcasting is getting more popular, it seems that videocasting may just be next. There was a short article on CNET this morning about homegrown TV shows on the Internet, “Web makes TV a medium for the masses�. The article mentions former TechTV personalities’, Kevin Rose and Dan Huard, webshow, Systm. These two basically found a way to move forward post the G4 takeover, to continue to promote what they enjoy via this new medium.

I also ran across a piece in the Washington Post last week by Robert MacMillan that mentions CBS’s revitalization plans for their website. CBS will begin having its correspondents and producers create video reports throughout the day specifically for their website, stuff that doesn’t really make it to the evening news, but still some quality journalism. He quoted USA Today about how the major media companies recognize that as Internet signals are being fed into TVs, that people will begin to pick and choose their content from the Internet versus just what is being offered by the networks at scheduled times.

I find all this very interesting, because working here at SnapStream, we follow everything TV. With the DVR technology, we’re already embracing the watch what you want when you want idea, but it is definitely limited to previously scheduled broadcasts. However, the videocasting and television networks move towards the web opens another door for us. We already have SnapStream Spotlight, which lets our users pull down ESPN’s video clips off the Internet automatically, but as more networks are doing this and videocasting gets more popular, I think we definitely have new territory to explore.

Well, on a different note, I got a cell phone the other day.

I’m guessing that for most of you, cell phones are old news, but for me, they’re new and interesting. I’m sure some of you are wondering, how does anyone live without a cell phone nowadays?

Actually, I’ve gone without a cell phone for a long time and done just fine, thank you. You see, I prefer to work in stretches without any interruptions, and cell phones, by their very nature, make that somewhat difficult. If you take some time to read productivity literature, you’ll see a lot about how it takes 15 minutes to resume flow after it’s been broken, and how all the constant interruptions are probably making us, as a society, less productive, not more productive.

Despite that little bit of philosophizing, I finally decided to get one. What’s changed? Despite the risk of constant interruption, I have simply decided that I will see if becomes a problem and manage appropriately if it does by turning off the phone or asking people not to call me at particular times unless it’s urgent. Of course, there are definitely the usual advantages to owning a phone that have nothing to do with work, such as being able to sync up with buddies when you’re heading somewhere, grabbing lunch, or whatever. And, on top of that, the availability of reasonably priced unlimited Internet access built into the phone is something that simply wasn’t around the last time I messed with mobile phones. The Internet is…well, it’s the Internet. Omnipresent access to that is a big deal.

OK, that’s the phone angle. Phone good, but interruption bad. Let’s come at this from another angle.

One thing that I *have* been carrying around for a long time is a PDA. A trusty old Palm III, no less. It’s probably a good 5 or 6 years old now. I carried it around with my notes and contacts everywhere. For all of the time that I owned it, I never felt a real solid urge to upgrade from it to a newer Palm or Pocket PC. And it all boiled down to one thing. Can you guess what that thing was?

Battery life.

The Palm III lasts a few months on a set of AA batteries and as an organizer, it does its job exceedingly well. One thing I try very hard to do is minimize the amount of crap I have to deal with on a daily basis. Recharging something daily, by that standard, is a very big offender.

The history of the PDA is pretty interesting. I’m now going to do it a vast injustice by summing it up in a few sentences.

There were initially several abortive attempts at PDA’s, most notably the Newton. But then, something different came along. The original Pilot was the first product that proved PDA’s actually could work…excellent battery life, great character recognition that was enabled by training the user to write using the “Graffiti” system, and built in PIM applications that did everything you needed to do to replace your standard planner.

Fast forward to today. The evolution of the PDA, sadly enough, has been mostly about shoving more and more power into the same package at the expense of battery life. Can you point to a current PDA that lasts for months on a single set of batteries right now? Because I can’t.

Interestingly enough, I actually owned a Newton for about a month, but the fact that it was large enough to require me to carry it around in some sort of purse like enclosure killed off my enthusiasm for the product.

Alright, now we’re getting somewhere. Basically, I knew that whatever I got would have to replace both my current PDA as well as serve as my phone, because I definitely was not going to carry both of those things around. I already hated the idea of having to plug in yet another piece of technology every day…but if I was going to do it, by golly it had better at the very least get rid of something else I was carrying around, or either PDA or the phone would certainly fall into a state of disuse.

Plus I don’t have enough pockets to add one more gadget to the mix. No, I’m not going to start wearing parachute pants.

Well, we’ve established that I needed a PDA phone. Next entry, I’ll talk about how I started looking for what to buy.

P.S. In case you’re wondering why I’m writing about phones on a SnapStream blog, there’s a number of reasons. One, there’s a high likelihood that you, the reader, is a techie like the rest of us here at SnapStream. I don’t see any reason not to talk about the common threads of life we encounter. Two, you’ll get some insights into how I think and how that influences the direction that our software takes (and possibly, I like to think, why we win the occasional award or two).

Richard Kuo
Chief Technology Officer

We released Beyond TV 3.7 earlier this week, so Rakesh asked me to say a little about what’s inside the box.

Release notes:
http://www.snapstream.com/Products/beyondtv/release_notes.asp

The biggest splash item in Beyond TV 3.7 is the new support for Plextor’s TV402U/MV402U and support for integrated audio in ATI’s newer boards/drivers. First, to speak to the Plextor boards, they may not be the smallest USB boards out there, but they make up for the extra size with a sleek form factor. And, they have onboard hardware encoding to DivX which Beyond TV 3.7 not only supports but also timeshifts (even live TV). Trust me, that was a lot of work, but the result is very cool. ATI seems to be going the route of integrated audio on their new AIW boards and drivers. Beyond TV 3.7 now fully supports these new AIW products. I checked out the X600 on one of our PCI Express machines with Beyond TV 3.7 and was very impressed with the picture quality.

As a development team, we’ve also doubled our efforts to respond to the main issues pointed out by you guys. If you have ever uninstalled Beyond TV, you probably noticed the uninstall survey and thought “Nobody is going to read this.‿ Well, we have spent several hours reading them and identified the top issues that people were complaining about. I also spent some time talking to Tucker, everybody’s favorite tech support guy, and found out the top issues on his mind.

If you check out the release notes, you’ll see several fixes that directly address your forum posts, tech support inquiries, and feedback from our surveys. Some good examples are the ability to test Link trial with a Beyond TV Trial, the ability to easily change your default folder for recordings, and not showing hidden channels on guide search results. There are tons of other minor bug fixes that we didn’t even list on the release notes. I guess, some of the best things in Beyond TV 3.7 will never show up on a marketing flier, but hopefully, you guys will notice. So thanks for all of the input! We’re listening.

It’s that time again. We’ve posted a new living room in the SnapStream Digital Living Room Showcase.

This one features a home theater room with a 100″ projection screen. It was submitted to us by StanP via Flickr. He has a dual-tuner PVR that uses Beyond TV, a Hauppauge PVR 500MCE TV Tuner card and a Firefly PC Remote.

Want to submit your living room? Submit your digital living room now.

Digital Living Room Three (7/8/05)
Submitted via Flickr by: StanP

This SnapStream living room setup features a 100″ projection screen,
with the touch screen on the left doubling as a remote.

Components

• Shuttle PC – P4 3.00Ghz
• HT
  Proxima DP 9295 Projector – 4100 Lumens
• Elo Touch Screen Monitor
• DaLite 100â€? Cinema Contour Frame – Pro-Trim Finish – High Contrast Screen
• nVidia GeForce 6800

• SnapStream Beyond TV 3.5.3
• Hauppauge 500-MCE
• Firefly PC Remote