SnapStream Blog

I’m a part-time Macintosh user. It’s a long story, but my wife and I actually got one of the original iMacs as a wedding gift. Yeah, I know, really nice wedding gift (shout out to John!). The best part is that we use it and love it… but I digress. Being involved full-time (and then some) in the “media center” software space and being an occasional Macintosh user, I was intrigued when Apple launched Front Row, a full-screen interface to photos, music, DVDs and videos on the Mac. But I haven’t seen Apple market this very much — no TV ads with mentions of Front Row, not a lot of play in Jobs’ keynotes, etc. I suspect it was the equivalent of someone’s 20% time at Apple and got the greenlight because people at Apple were intrigued by it, but who knows, maybe it was a requirementthat came from the top down.

Anyways, Apples seems to finally be giving Front Row some airtime in their marketing, as evidenced by this e-mail that I received last night:

So it’s late at night and I’m browsing a bunch of different HTPC related forums. I post a bunch over on the htpcnews forums on SnapStream (while mentally flogging myself for not being more active there in the past couple of months… doh!). I head over to byopvr and I see a familiar avatar… it’s Will Ferrell! Hey, I know him, it’s btvfreak!

I see btvfreak’s posts on our forums all the time, but I guess I never took the time to actually click on the links in his sig. Tonight I did and I was extremely impressed with his Beyond TV setup… and how thoroughly he’s documented all the details on his blog.

Let’s take a tour:

We start by checking out btvfreak’s Beyond TV server, with what looks like 3 HDTV TV tuners and 3 analog TV tuners. Not bad.

Then, we move on to his living room and bedroom setups. Both are outfitted with quiet, attractive looking HTPC cases running Beyond TV Link.

Finally, checkout btvfreak’s home theater setup, complete with 46″ TV, an HTPC running Beyond TV Link and Beyond Media and a good ‘ol xbox.

Wow.

Ever had the desire to wirelessly share recorded TV content, videos, music, and pictures to televisions throughout the house? For those of you who said yes, Hauppauge now has answered your demands with their new Wireless MediaMVP. Did I mention it was wireless?

Hauppauge sent us an evaluation unit of the Wireless MediaMVP (referred to as WMVP henceforth) the other day, so I decided to take advantage of this freebie, and test the unit in my house by connecting my Beyond TV server to the WMVP (see figure 1 below).

Attention to the weak-stomached– my living quarters are very small, so setting up a real-world test scenario realistically came down to two options.

1) Place the WMVP unit right next to my family room TV (which already has a Beyond TV server hooked up to it), or

2) Set up a 13� television in my bathroom (approximately 25 feet from my Beyond TV server) and connect the WMVP to the small screen TV.

I opted for option 2—for the sake of being different AND to determine if I would actually realize value by using the device in this environment. After making my decision, it was time to go through the process of setting up the WMVP and configuring it to work with my Beyond TV server and home wireless LAN.

Figure 1. Network layout of my Beyond TV server, wireless router, and WMVP

Caption. The WMVP connects wirelessly (or via physical Ethernet) to my wireless router, which grabs the media stream originating from my Beyond TV PC.

Setup of the WMVP was very straightforward. I simply installed the included Hauppauge software on my Beyond TV server, told the software which folders on my PC to serve up (see figure 2), and plugged the WMVP into my 13� TV. After configuring the WMVP to communicate with my wireless network (see figure 3), I was ready to rock-and-roll.

Figure 2: Hauppauge software included on CD-ROM

Figure 3: LAN configuration screen

After setup of the WMVP on my LAN, I was able to stream previously recorded content captured with Beyond TV 4.4 (see figure 4) (MPEG-2 Good quality) over the network to my bathroom as well as MP3s (see figure 5), photos, and home videos.

Figure 4. Play back previously recorded videos

Figure 5. Play back MP3s

The biggest question I had before setting the device up was whether or not video playback could be done wirelessly in a quality acceptable to me. Note, in order to be acceptable to me, video must not be choppy, audio and video must be in sync, and the video quality must be pleasant to the eye at full screen. To my surprise, the quality did pass my standards– video playback was good (no choppiness), there was no video or audio interruption and the full-screen videos looked relatively clear and non-pixilated.

After the WMVP passed the “Video Playback Test�, it was obvious to me that it would have no trouble playing MP3s, and displaying photos. As expected, when the MP3 and Photos tests (playing back MP3s and flipping through a slide show respectively) were applied, I had no issues with the WMVP.

Now that the testing had concluded, the million dollar question was—would I actually use the WMVP in the bathroom? The answer to that question was yes and no.

Yes, I did use the WMVP quite frequently for streaming MP3s through the TV. It turned out to be especially handy when getting ready in the mornings, when longer periods of time were spent preparing for work. Listening to music while brushing my teeth and flossing set my day off on the right foot. As for photos, videos, and TV shows, I did not spend much time taking advantage of those capabilities.

I could see where this would be a very handy little product if I had another room to stream to—in an area where photos, video, and TV streaming made more sense, like a bedroom. Even so, the ability to sing along to music in the shower, and the side-benefit of being a great conversation piece makes the WMVP “Bathroom Edition� an essential piece of Water Closet hardware.

To all the h8ters out there that didn’t show any love to our 2 terabytes of Maxtor goodness, this should make you happy. Introducing Titanic (aka The Juggernaut 2). This time, we needed space in-house (as opposed to the collocation facility), so we pulled out the tried and true juggernaut recipe to make another batch of 1.5tb raid 5 goodness. As the requirements for expandability weren’t as high, we didn’t go for the full 15 drive chassis, instead, opting for a 6 hot swap bay rack-mount case along with only a 4 port Fasttrack 4310 controller. This will allow us to merge all of our High-Def Test files into one nice server, which, at 8gb/hour, have been eating up our normal drive space.

I wanted to let you know that we just released the latest update to Beyond TV, version 4.4, this afternoon. Read the release notes here. There isn’t a lot of glittery new stuff in this version, but a number of under-the-hood fixes. All part of our commitment to deliver the most reliable and easiest to user PVR product for the PC.

The one other thing worth mentioned about this release is that the Web Admin, for the first time, includes contributions from our community. We opened up the Web Admin source code under a shared source license with the last release of Beyond TV. Thanks to bradpvr and ccarlin (and, er, anyone else that I left out…) for their code updates and checkins!

As usual, current Beyond TV owners can download the upgrade for free. And if you buy or download Beyond TV starting now, you’ll be getting the latest release. Enjoy!

Each fall, the avid television watcher faces the daunting task of sorting through all of the new shows to decide what to watch. The traditional method would be to trust a reviewer to suggest a few new shows to catch and make sure to watch the pilots of those shows, lest ye never understand what the heck is going on (I’m looking at you, ‘Lost’). Reviewers are sometimes on a different wavelength than the general public, though, so thankfully there’s another way to play this game. Just have your PVR record everything and be your own reviewer.

Last year, I decided to no longer trust the media to tell me what to watch. Instead, I recorded nearly everything and methodically watched it all (or as much of each show as I could stand) until I figured out my favorites. The details of my system are below, but the jist of it is that I did my research ahead of time to help plan out what to record and when to watch it. My goal was to spend as little time as possible previewing shows that weren’t up my alley. After it was all said and done, I came out of the fall 2005 season with a good list of shows I religously watched, and they served me well for the year.

In sharing my methods (which I’m calling “Project Hoover”), I hope you too can gain back the hours of your life normally squandered by bad TV.

This article is a four-part guide:

1. First, I’ll walk you through how to setup your Beyond TV PVR to record all the shows that are on so you can decide for yourself. When I say all the shows, I mean all the shows. I’ll show you a setup that can actually record all 6 networks at once.
2. Next, I’ll give you my tips on how to choose what YOU should watch.
3. Then, I’ll give you the full buffet of shows to choose from, in order of start date.
4. Last, I’ll walk you through my guide of what to look out for this season.

(more…)

We’ve added a new way to pay in the SnapStream Store — PayPal! If you have a PayPal account, just choose PayPal in the shopping cart (figure 1 below) or on the billing information page (figure 2 below). Using PayPal lets you pay directly from your bank account (in case you don’t have a credit card), it saves you the hassle of re-entering your credit card information or billing address, and it lets you keep your credit card information private. I read some research that 20% of all online transactions are paid with PayPal and having seen the usage since we launched it yesterday, I believe it!

If you have trouble using PayPal in the store or if you have any questions, post ‘em in the comments.

Figure 1: PayPal in the shopping cart

Figure 2: PayPal on the billing information page

Continuing our drive to make our co-located services more reliable and easier to work on, we tackled the very large problem of the mess of wires and wasted rack space.

The problem:
1. There was nearly 7U of wasted space. (For the normal people out there, a ‘U’ is 1.75″ of vertical space in a rack)
2. Wires were everywhere.

3. We had outgrown our power outlets into the rack and needed more to plug in our servers.
4. Without physically being at the rack, we couldn’t turn on or off a device.

The solution:
1. Remove every last component from the rack and rebuild it from scratch. By doing this, we were able to group our different servers into logical units, as well as put all the dells at the top, making it look cool. Also, we re-mounted our switches in a way that freed up another U.
2. While the rack is apart, properly install and use cable management to clean up the nest of wires.
3 & 4. Install higher amperage power distribution units that have more outlets. As well, we chose two Switched PDUs from APC that have both serial and IP based management. Now, if a device needs to be rebooted, all we have to do is visit a web page.

10pm, The Night of the Swap
What in the world have we gotten ourselves into? Percy, Jason and I arrived at the facility and took a second to look at the task ahead of us. We took all of our external monitoring applications offline for the time being (as to not get paged over and over that the site was down) and then turned off all of the servers in order.

We started by removing each server one at a time and marking all of the important pieces.
It was looking nice.

11PM, Making Progress
Slowly but surely we took each item out.

11:30 PM, Everything Is Out
38U of stuff later and we had a real mess on our hands.

We left the console installed, but finally had everything else out. Not too bad.

Now To Put It Back Together
We started by installing the wiring (network and kvm) and putting in the cable management.

4am, A few Snags Later
At this point, I’m only bleeding a little (dang sharp metal), but we’ve made a lot of progress. We found out why the bottom U was never used (it had a ledge that stuck up) but still managed to use it by moving a non-dell server to that spot.

7am, Pretty much back together
At this point, we had most of the servers back in and wired right. Each box took about 45 minutes to totally wire, notwithstanding the fact that we were tired by this point.

Once the boxes were all in and powered up, we started testing the sites. We did have one casualty. A backend data loading box decided it didn’t want to boot anymore. It couldn’t decide if it was 650mhz or 1ghz and kept hanging. We had to take it in to work on it.

In The End
After it was all said and done, we had a much more manageable space on our hands. We all learned a lot of things on proper rack installation and will draw on that knowledge as we do more work. Since these pictures were taken, we’ve actually put in 3 more servers at the top of the rack. It really fills out the space nicely.