Welcome to the first SnapStream Q&A session!
July 29th, 2005 at 2:25 pm by rkuo
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
July 29th, 2005 at 3:07 pm
Thank YOU for for giving us the chance to ask questions for responding so well, so quickly.
July 29th, 2005 at 7:20 pm
Great update. You have a solid well thought out plan to move this product forward.
July 30th, 2005 at 10:14 am
Firewire? ahhhhhhhhh, great update but while you were on the subject you could’ve said something about firewire! How is it different than OTA?
July 30th, 2005 at 10:45 am
Agree with all…I applaud the effort setting up the Q&A and look forward to further updates. Keep looking hard at Firewire HD support…that will be the deal breaker for me. Nice work!
August 1st, 2005 at 1:25 am
I’m sorry but i am sure that there are a lot more people that want his feature hat I’m wanting so it make it easer to use Beyond TV, and makes it easer to manage the Hard Drive folders. I want it to fail over to the next available hard drive, not to be limited to one hard disk. So that it doesn’t have to be managed by each program were it will be recorded to. This is a very un-efficient way to manage how and were my shows are recorded to.
Greg Caulder
August 12th, 2005 at 2:56 pm
It’s nice to see the new version comming. I just hope that QAM is not to far behind. I really don’t want to buy an ATSC card and antenna and then in a month be able to use a QAM card. Please hurry with the QAM and keep up the good work!
September 9th, 2005 at 11:43 am
HD over FireWire….please!?
October 28th, 2005 at 10:51 am
The overwhelming usage of tuner cards is to watch TV on one’s PC. This is the core usage of these cards, although such people may not be the loud hobbyists one finds on many public forums.
Some of the functionality that Beyond TV 4 needs to implement and which FusionHDTV uses are awaiting:
I just received the FusionHDTV5 card (in California, USA) and was hoping to use it to replace my ATI All In Wonder 9600 with digital HDTV capability.
However, I found some problems which I want fixed in future software:
1) there appears to be only limited Closed captions capability in the software provided with this card and the software provided with it, which is a major omission.
a) Even for those who are not deaf, but are listening to sound over the PC speakers, often the CC text
of the dialogue in the Closed Captions is important to understand or confirm the words uttered.
Sometimes the words need to be translated manually from some other language to english,
which requires the use of Closed Captions.
If you have ever downloaded a movie in .mpg or .avi form from the Internet, you will usually find that the
closed captions are available from the same source with an extension like .SRT. This is an extremely
important feature and I hope this functionality either exists now or is intended in the next software release.
ATI uses the extension .CC.
b) The realtime display of Closed Caption text should be able to be Copied and Pasted from its window
by the user dynamically in order to facilitate functions like language translation.
c) inside the FusionHDTV5 .CC file, there should be implemented a feature comparable to the Mark capability in VCRs,
which allows the user to identify certain times within the recording as being important, for easy access when
the playback is performed under the control of a FusionHDTV playback application.
(i.e. while recording the user, when he sees something significant could use the mouse to click on the Mark icon
and that action would insert a line or notation within the .CC at that point for later access, such as
%Mark1% %Mark2% %Mark3% etc.
d) In playback the user would then be able to select “Play” or “Play From Mark #…”
Playback should start from a point maybe 5 second earlier than when the Mark mouse click occurred,
allowing for the time it takes for the user to manually mouse click the Mark icon.
e) There should be a .CC Export Text function, which allows the text of the .CC file to be saved to a .TXT file
with the relative time synchronization lines stripped out.
2) Recording Scheduler needs to implement the concept of “Every Weekday”,
as a record frequency Cycle selection. Most networks have a different schedule for their weekday
programming from their weekend programming.
3) The Right Click menu should implement the
a) “Record For…” a number of minutes or hours and minutes, and
b) “Record Until…” a certain time of day,
c) “Record” indefinitely, options.
4) It should be possible to have multiple TV cards pictures in multiple windows on the Windows desktop.
9) The Volume setting in the FusionHDTV5 control panel should be decoupled from the Windows XP Pro Volume Control/Master Volume applet settings, so that when the user changes the FusionHDTV Volume setting it performs adjustable pre-amp capability to the Windows XP Wave audio mixer input and does not directly affect it.
i.e. do Volume setting the way ATI does it. Currently, FusionHDTV5 volume setting directly changes the Windows XP Wave volume setting which prevents the user from controlling the relative volume of the FusionHDTV, relative to other Windows XP Wave inputs like MP3 players, game software etc. Currently FusionHDTV is too loud, relative to other Wave inputs like MP3 player MusicMatch.
10) The default size of the FusionHDTV5 recorded file is 3 times (3X) the size of the .mpg file I normally save to my PC under ATI.
I normally configure the ATI recording disk consumption to generate 4 selectable levels of precision which range between
300 MBytes and 530 MBytes per hour, all 4 of them at 640×480 video resolution and 128 kbit/second Audio.
Converting large files after they have been saved is likely a slow process. I find the operation of such applications like Windows Movie Maker to be painfully slow.
11) Sometimes if a dormant hard disk spins up and temporarily hangs the Windows XP operating system for a few seconds, the video and sound displayed by FusionHDTV5 can become slightly out of synchronization, with the video appear about half a second before the sound (I noticed this in the middle of an hour record to a disk which was not dormant).
12) A few keyboard intuitive usability issues (or, why make the product harder to use than necessary) :
Up Arrow should increase channel by one
Down Arrow should decrease channel by one
Left Arrow should decrease Volume
Right Arrow should increase Volume
Backspace should switch channel to the previous channel user selected
“F” should cycle in circular fashion through Favorites channels
Shift-F should cycle through Favorite channels in reverse order
Ctrl-F Full Screen to Window alternate toggle
Ctrl-M Mute alternate toggle
Ctrl-C should display the Configuration menu.
Ctrl-E should end a recording.
Ctrl-R should start recording.
Ctrl-D sets configuration settings back to defaults
Ctrl-H should display a list of these keyboard accelerators, amongst other help information.
ESC should be a reliable retreat from any command entry sequence.
13) FusionHDTV should be able to identify call letters of all channels (e.g. ESPN, WABC, TMC) from the EPG information downloaded from whatever zip code based EPG site FusionHDTV uses and should display that name when the channel is switched.
I hope FusionHDTV developers will focus on these core functionalities before doing anything else to the current code base.
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21) the Audio generated by the FusionHDTV5 card is incompatible with other software packages like SageTV, BeyondTV, Got All Media etc. This means that the user cannot use these other existing applications to perform complex functions like Closed Captions, pre-amped Audio Volume Control, and EPG.
The quickest workaround to solve these huge problems is for FusionHDTV to deliver a modified Audio driver which will emulate some other well known card’s Audio (e.g. ATI or Hauppauge) driver, so that your customers can use one of these 3rd party software applications.
22) FusionHDTV5 Control Panel has disappeared from the windowed mode and now is only available when in the user puts FusionHDTV5 into full screen mode and then mouse left clicks. Using the V command or the right click and then Show Controller has no effect; the FusionHDTV5 Control Panel remains hidden.
The FusionHDTV5 Control Panel did display when the software was first installed but disappeared permanently after a day of use.
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November 10th, 2005 at 12:27 am
Aeneas, please contact me at snapstream@ddz.net ? Thanks!
June 5th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
ok, one dedicated htpc and another workstatio n/HTPC
aMY GOAL: EDIT VIDEO AND DUMP 1 HOUR SHOWS TO VCD, EVERYTHIHG TO BE DUMPABLE TO Creatie Zen Portable Media Center (.wmv format required) Files will be brought in on TV and over the broadband
workstation has a x800XT ALL IN WONDER
2G ram, p2 3.07Ghz Hyperthreading
scsi ssystem, swap and cache drives for speed
raid 0 sata drives for storage, AUDIGY 2 ZS for audio
studio 9.x for editing, 15″ TV for theater mode video while editing
Double sided/ dual layer atapi DVD Writer
htpc in a HTPC sexy case has 1.7Ghz 1G ram 2004 model of AIW 9600 XT
Raided IDE drives for speed, DVD Writer
Both are few or soon will be fed with highspeed DSL to download movies and tv shows form Vongo.com and othr sources
I also have read that I can puta TV Wonder card in with the X800 all in wonder card for a dula tuner setup, PIP and all that
I have a 1st and 2nd generation Happauge 150 PVR cards, which is either or boh can I put them in conrolled bwhat workware and what remote?
I also have a USB Pinnacle Moviebox, I’d like to use it in a VCR loop as a full digital VCR, again, with what softwae?
I own Beyond TV and will buy whatever’s the best out there to control them all like a TiVo with jus the remote and with a wireless keyboard
My Final Products are going to be 1 hour VCDs for episoides of Law and Order and the like, and WMV for my Creative Zen Portable Media Center.
I I have to do it in multiple steps I will. I also want to be able in import video from TiVo video desktop (MPeg2 pr 4 I think) Please let me know what software packages that are out there from to user internface front ends for TiVo like stuff and what Media Editing software for the ATI and Oinnacle hardware and output to WMF so i cna carry around stuff.
I have a ton of stuff on vcd and real DVD is you can suggest a good ripper.
Contact me descretely at kc0edo@yahoo.com
-BT
September 11th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
[...] Snapstream has posted Maxium PC’s review of Beyond TV. It was a very brief review without too much detail, and they must be the first (or apart of the minority) who like the fact that Beyond TV and Beyond Media are separate products rather than one integrated media center experience. We like the ala carte approach that Snapstrem has taken with its product. [...]
October 2nd, 2006 at 11:41 am
products for deaf people
can u provide more information ?
October 10th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Is there any software out there that lets me
1 lets me watch tv over wifi connection? this should still let me change channels on differnt pc’s. I would love this to send raw data over the wifi so if I have a wifi tv tuner it could as well pick up the data.
2 lets me have Picture in picture (recording or not)
3 independant volume control. I sometimes watch the News and have mp3s playing but I dont want to turn them all down. sometimes it would be nice to turn down the music to hear what is going on tv. sometimes I want to have the TV showing say… the weather channel but let the music blast in the bg.
Post here and let me know! (sorry spelling mistakes did this on a 2way)
November 16th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
I’ve got the latest & greatest version of Beyond Media, but it doesn’t work with my DVD encoder – Power DVD 5.0. I know that there was some issue with Power DVD, but what’s the fix?
Any answers are greatly appreciated!!!
Klaus
November 28th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
“QAM capture is in a state of flux” – Does this still hold true? The QAM feature on my Divco HDTV Fusion works just fine, but I would love to use the abundant features Beyond TV offers if it ever supports it.
December 5th, 2006 at 2:35 am
How is QAM in a state of flux.. as far as i know the basic standard has not changed in years.. if a set top HD box like the samsung sirt451 can do it, I don’t see why those of us with PCI cards capable cannot. I personally would love to see a media app that will play my HDTV over cable, and any other un-encrypted QAM channels as well as the analog cable.. My FusionHDTV5 does it already, but the only software that supports the QAM tuning is the stock software from dvico.
October 5th, 2007 at 7:53 am
Still Waiting! The featuers announced with 4.7 of beyond TV are nice but not what we are waiting for. We are waiting for the integration of the beyond media componenet into Beyond TV. I and I know others are looking at the competition and see this there already
On my way to:
SageTV
MediaPortal
GBPVR
even dare I say MS MediaCenter
All of thes produvts currently have the Beyond Media component as part of the base product not an add on.
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I have to say that I’m still waiting. I have looked and have switched to MS MediaCenter….. well sort of.
It is far to clunky to switch between Beyond TV and Beyond Media. So beyond Media never got through the first week of the trial.
I have my remote set that when I press the media center button it leaves beyond TV and goes directly to media center to play my music. Then if I leave media center (or select Beyond TV in more programs) it takes me back to Beyond TV.
Would I ever ditch Beyond TV? Not unless we get commercial skip in media center.
Would I be willing to pay $50 for integration? Not likely now. I’ve been left out in the cold for too long. I’ve found my own solution. $25 maybe.
While I may not have been loyal enough to buy a product that I don’t like, making us happy would go a long way to getting us to recommend it to our friends.