SnapStream Q&A
August 8th, 2005 at 6:16 pm by rkuo
Does Snapstream have any plans to introduce a “large font” mode into the user interface for the visually impaired?
Just to fill readers in who aren’t familiar with this problem, visibility of fonts on a monitor is a far cry from tweaking visibility for your television. Your monitor is designed to display detailed information at high resolutions. Your television, on the other hand, is designed to display moving images with vivid contrast and brightness. In fact, monitors are so precise compared to televisions that you’ll often hear your average television viewer complain that the video looks worse on a monitor because there is enough detail to expose all the flaws that are present in the video. And not just the video itself…some actors don’t hold up so well under the HDTV microscope either!
But back to reading text. It’s very easy, if you are a programmer that doesn’t know anything about designing software for televisions, to create something that is perfectly readable on your computer and completely unreadable on standard televisions. We’ve unfortunately seen this all too often in other products. We, of course, already design our software for optimal viewing on televisions.
For the visually impaired, there is additional work that needs to done. We’ll confine this discussion to Beyond Media, since the user interfaces will be unified soon under its next generation architecture. While there’s no global setting for modifying font sizes under Beyond Media’s architecture yet, all is not lost. It’s fairly easy to do a global search and replace on the XML files which comprise skins in Beyond Media and adjust the font sizes yourself if you need to do so.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We’ll evaluate adding more direct support for large font modes in future updates.
Are any changes to the EULA and API forthcoming? How about streaming video?
We do have some plans to introduce EULA changes with the 4.0 release. One changes we plan on making is altering the EULA so that Beyond TV SDK web services are free for non-commercial use, whether locally or over the network. However, the EULA will still require a Link license if the information is used to locate or stream media from the server. Commercial use will continue to be covered under the current terms of the license.
As far as actual network hooks for streaming video, the reason we haven’t exposed this to our developer community is because of how tricky networked playback is. Playing videos is a very platform specific problem. Therefore, any support we provided for our streaming protocols would be extremely Windows specific and also specific to how we build our application.
We also plan to modify the EULA to accommodate the use of aggregated data to help deliver better products and services to our customers. Specifically, interesting scenarios such as:
1. Figuring out what parts of the application people use the most
2. Figuring out where users run into the most problems
3. Building in community technologies that allow users to contribute to the Beyond TV experience.
I know that’s a bit vague, but details will be forthcoming. We’re working on some features that you’ll never see on a big corporate mass produced PVR. So if you want to go beyond regular TV, install and run Beyond TV! What a concept! 
Remember, you can ask us questions by posting to our Q&A forum. We answer a couple of questions each week.
Richard Kuo
Chief Technology Officer
August 11th, 2005 at 5:10 pm
I have some major requests that i hope people will find this if they Google it. In BeyondTB 4 i want the following.
1. Were you have the multiple Folders on different different hard drives, i want Beyond TV to be able if the Default recording folder gets full it will automaticaly fail over to the next aviable recording folder.(Because their competitor SageTV already has this very valuable feature)
2. The total time remaining for recordings are recalculated for all space on all recording folders. Not just the default recording folder.
3. Automatic scin selection that we can change in the settings.
If i have any more thing thta I and many other want ill post it later.
Please Post your comments.
August 19th, 2005 at 9:54 am
Re: the Font issue. I know this might only apply to a few of us, but when working with the font situation I would like to add that some of us use dual video outputs. For example my HTPC is in the Home Theater and video is displayed on a large projected screen. And of course all text is crisp as can be. It’s a DLP PJ being driven directly by the video card’s monitor output. (SVGA)
But I also clone that HTPC’s video to the S-Video output that drives a modulator to feed the whole house RF distribution. When not using the home theater we can still watch BTV/BM on any TV in the house. However .. the text (as you noted) is not exactly optimal on the TVs.
So what would be really NICE, would be the ability to “toggle” the font easily from within the viewscape. So we can switch the font view easily to match other viewing devices in our systems.