SnapStream Q&A
September 12th, 2005 at 12:57 am by rkuo
Will there be support for multiple HD tuners in Beyond TV 4?
Absolutely! We have this running in house and in our homes right now, and it works great.
Some limitations that you should be aware of. First of all, splitting the HD signal to multiple tuners must be done with care. It’s very easy to cause the signal to drop out or disappear entirely if done improperly. Second, as with all multi-tuner situations, keep an eye on the overall performance and responsiveness of your system as the number of tuners increases.
Third and last, BTV4 will support multiple HDTV tuners, but that doesn’t mean the cards themselves will (although many of them do). Because we want your experience to be as trouble-free as we can possibly make it, we will be posting a list of recommended multi-tuner configurations before the release of BTV4. If you end up trying alternate configurations, please make sure to do a little web surfing on your purchases to verify the card and drivers you purchase support this feature.
Are there any plans to improve the basic intelligence of the product in the 4.0 release, particularly in the area of conflict handling?
Definitely. For example, we recently made changes that allow users to adjust the start and end of recordings to work around the infamous CSI-ER overlap issue. We’ve also licensed and rolled out new HDTV guide services in preparation for HDTV support in Beyond TV 4. Apparently some companies consider this optional? No, I really don’t understand it either.
Anyway, in BTV4 you will see new HD indicators in the program guide so you can immediately identify what shows will be airing in all of their full high-resolution glory. We will definitely be continuing to tweak the available types of recordings and available information to catch all of those little side cases that our customers come up with. Although…don’t forget, adding an extra tuner or two is a very easy and reliable way to save you from worrying about recording conflicts!
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
September 12th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
this is good news! please try to let us know what hardware
has been verified for multi-tuner use as soon as practical.
many of us would like to get the hardware ordered and installed
to be ready to do beta-testing.
September 16th, 2005 at 5:30 pm
Any BDA-compliant ATSC tuner card should work.
September 18th, 2005 at 3:34 am
I don’t want to buy some big antenna, and put it on top of my house. I also don’t want to buy new equipment. I live in southern central New Hampshire.
I have been testing PVR softwware for two years now – spending roughly five grand on new hardware over those two years. I’m actually still using PC based software to record all the TV we watch as a family (as of today not BTV) to record at least 100 gig worth of shows and movies every day.
But not for HDTV content. I got myself a dual tuner HD STB. Couldn’t be happier.
October 16th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
Curious what features you plan on integrating to compete with Products such as Sling Media, Orb Networks or Sony’s Location xx? Or do you plan on competing? You currently have live streaming so it seems like it shouldnt be too hard to do so. Even if it requires another dedicated computer it would be very useful to be able to stream to my Laptop, 3G phone, Treo650 or Dell Axim and have a interface similar to Snapstreams main. Like a mini Beyondtv link.
In the new version will you be able to RIP your DVD’s to the Harddrive to create a DVD JukeBox (Menus and All intact)? MythTV does this and I believe someone made a plugin that does this for BeyondTV but a integrated version would be great.
October 20th, 2005 at 10:49 pm
Looking for BeyondTV to help me create a DVD Library/Jukebox, on my Hard Drives. Like current features of BeyondTV3, looking foreward to the HD upgrade in the BeyondTV4.
October 21st, 2005 at 4:03 am
Everybody talkng about HD tuners and recording HD. However, most if not all cable TV systems that use a digital signal require a tuner that will descramble the digital signal via a cable card. It’s hard to imagine any cable company sending out their digital cable tv channels unencrypted. So as far as recording the digital signal itself via a TV Card without a cable card, I can’t see how that would work. I”m speaking of Cable Tv and the 5C encryption. Is there software out there that will descramble that?
October 24th, 2005 at 5:56 pm
I’m with Bruno on this HD thing. Yeah HD is awesome but without a cable card what good does it do me (unless I want OTA HD which is not an extremely worthwhile option where I live).
However, it IS nice to se the BYTV crew bringing it out, even if I will have to wait to benefit from it for some time.
October 26th, 2005 at 11:23 pm
The only thing I am worried about is codec support. I think it is great that BTV will once again have Divx support. But will you still be able to encode into Windows media? For me, that ability is important because I showsqueeze my recordings at night and put them on my portable media center, which runs Microsoft software that only plays WMV.
You know what might be a nice feature; BTV taking the SmartSkip data and using it to slice commercials out when it ShowSqueezes. I have been surprised at the accuracy of SmartSkip and think this would be a great option. But I am not a legal expert and imagine there is some sort of legal issues with doing that…. …. is there an SDK for BeyondTV?