SnapStream Blog

Guest blog posting by Jack Romano (romanoj)

The MediaMVP from Hauppauge is this great little device that lets you get photos, music and videos off of your PC and onto your television. And it’s cheap – only $100. As Tom wrote about here, without any extra work, you can use it to playback recordings made with Beyond TV. All you have to do is just point to the recorded shows directory. The MediaMVP will play your MPEG2 or Divx files. But it’s a less than ideal experience for lots of reasons:

• You can only see titles of the video files and you can’t view information like show description, original airdate, etc.
• You can’t watch live TV
• You can’t delete a show that you’ve already watched
• You can’t schedule new recordings or see which recordings are scheduled

So with these limitations in mind, a team of us decided that we could create a better interface. We created the open source MediaMVP BTV interface project. With our software, you get something closer to the complete Beyond TV experience (plus some extras like weather and Music playlists!), including access to live TV, and the program guide!

In short, just download the project file. Unzip and run the setup. Re-boot the MediaMVP and voila! You have a BTV extender at no additional cost.

Screenshot of the MediaMVP Beyond TV interface

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One of the on-going battles in the PC PVR business is making it as easy as possible for people to get up and running with our product. We’ve seen it time and time again — once people have Beyond TV running, they love it. But getting people to that point is never as easy as we’d like (case in point: the forum that gets the most traffic on forums.snapstream.com is the Beyond TV Support forum). People have to figure out how Beyond TV works with their TV source, then figure out what hardware they need (since most PCs don’t come with a TV tuner card by default… at least, not yet) and then figure out how to set it all up.

Last week, we published a tool on our website which hopefully makes part of this process easier — the Beyond TV Wizard will ask you a series of questions (what country are in? do you want to use Beyond TV on a laptop or a desktop? etc) and then give you a personalized hardware recommendations.

This is a new tool and it’s somewhat experimental — please try it out and give us your feedback.

I’m by no means a professional actor, but last week I took a stab at recording a product demonstration for Beyond TV 4. I used this really neat software called Camtasia Studio that allows me to record a user-defined section of the screen.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to create various mini-demos on specific Beyond TV 4 features . If anybody has ideas or suggestions on what features you think could use explanation, or if you would just be interested in hearing more about something within Beyond TV 4, drop me a comment!!

Beyond TV 4 Product Demonstration

So you don’t miss them, here are the shows starting 9/23 – 10/4

9/23
48 Hours Mystery CBS

9/24
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition ABC
Desparate Housewived ABC
Brothers & Sisters ABC
Cold Case CBS
Without A Trace CBS

9/25
Heroes NBC
Gilmore Girls CW

9/26
Help Me Help You ABC

9/27
One Tree Hill CW
Friday Night Smackdown CW

9/28
Ugly Betty ABC
Smallville CW
Supernatural CW

10/1
Everybody Hates Chris CW
All of Us CW
Girlfriends CW
The Game CW

10/3
Friday Night Lights NBC
Veronica Mars CW

10/4
The Backelor: Rome ABC
Lost ABC
The Nine ABC
20 Good Years NBC

Many new shows are starting in the next two weeks. Use the following guide to schedule today so you won’t miss a single episode.

9/12
Dancing With The Stars ABC

9/17
The Amazing Race CBS

9/18
Wife Swap ABC
Deal or No Deal NBC
Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip NBC
The Class CBS
How I Met Your Mother CBS
Two and a Half Men CBS CBS
The New Adventures of Old Christine CBS
CSI: Miami CBS

9/19
Boston Legal ABC
Law and Order: Criminal Intent NBC
Law and Order: SVU NBC
NCIS CBS
The Unit CBS
Smith CBS

9/20
The Biggest Loser NBC
Kidnapped NBC
Jericho CBS
Criminal Minds CBS
CSI: NY CBS
America’s Next Top Model CW

9/21
Six Degrees ABC
Grey’s Anatomy ABC
My Name is Earl NBC
The Office NBC
ER NBC
Survivor: Cook Island CBS
CSI CBS
Shark CBS

9/22
America’s Funniest Home Videos ABC
Men In Trees ABC
Law and Order NBC
Ghost Whisperer CBS
Close to Home CBS
Numb3rs CBS

I’m still surprised at how simple it was to get this done, but Maximum PC went ahead and granted us the rights to put their October 2006 review of Beyond TV 4.3 (which I blogged about last week) here on the SnapStream website. Enjoy!

Read the complete review now >>
(this link will open a new window)

A few weeks back, we here at SnapStream decided to test-drive the new RF based GO 2.4 Optical Air Mouse and Compact Keyboard Suite by Gyration. The whole idea of testing the Gyration Suite (referred to as the “gyra suite� henceforth) was to determine whether or not this product would improve the overall entertainment experience when combined with our own Beyond TV and Beyond Media software. Though SnapStream already provides a remote control, in the Firefly PC Remote, the missing pieces to the overall puzzle are a qwerty style keyboard and an easy-to-use mouse.

On to the review— with the gyra suite laying in our office, screaming for attention, I decided to take it home for “testing� . Before I go into my using the gyra suite, I’d like to set the scene for you… In my home setup, I have a 50� Sony rear-projection HDTV which is hooked up to my HTPC (equipped with Beyond TV 4, Beyond Media, and Firefly Mini). The TV and HTPC are approximately 10 feet away from a 2-seat couch (directly in front of the TV). The couch is the area that I do most of my TV viewing either sitting directly in front of it, or lying down.

Because I do a lot of viewing late at night while lying down, and because the Firefly Mini PC Remote is IR based, there are often times that I have to awkwardly bend my arm to ensure that the IR receiver receives my button-presses, which as many people can attest to, is a very uncomfortable process. You may be asking yourself, “Why not just use the RF Firefly PC Remote?� I don’t do that because I am simply using the IR receiver portion of the Firefly Mini. I use a generic universal remote (provided by my cable company), which I have trained to blast Firefly Mini commands. With this universal remote I am able to control the PC, Television set, Cable box, and stereo receiver without ever having to switch remote controls.

Back to the testing… after bringing the gyra suite home with me, I got started immediately. The setup process was simple—I plugged the usb receiver into the front of my HTPC, inserted the included CD-ROM, went through the software setup process, and boom— I was using the wireless keyboard and mouse.

My first test was the “laying on the couch to see if the keyboard works� test. It was flawless. Searching for shows in Beyond TV became a much less stressful experience since there was no more arrowing letter-by-letter to perform my searches and because every keystroke I made with the keyboard and mouse was captured. I proceeded to navigate around Beyond TV and Beyond Media using the keyboard/mouse combinatin with great ease. After just 10 minutes, the gyra was beginning to grow on me.

My next test was the “window resizing test” using the wireless mouse. I shrunk the size of the Beyond TV window to fill the right half of my 50â€? screen, and opened 2 Firefox browsers placing them in the top-left and bottom-right quarters of the screen, respectively. Using the gyra keyboard and mouse, I turned on ESPN Sunday Night Football, muted the game sound (Not a big Joe “Theesmanâ€? fan), checked my email on the top browser, and followed the game statistics on the bottom browser.

In order to perform the above task without the gyra suite, it was necessary to physically plug a keyboard and mouse into my HTPC, and do all to opening and resizing of the windows while lying on the floor in front of the TV. This was a pain—and not to mention, was a very inefficient way to manipulate and navigate the windows once they had been opened.

Caption: Beyond TV, and two internet browsers opened at the same time. (Note: This image has been created for the sake of illustration and is not to scale.)

After determining that the gyra suite worked very well with Beyond TV/Beyond Media, and was an ideal way to control the screens on my PC from the couch, I started to look at some of the features that were specific to the gyra Air Mouse. After installing the included gyra software onto my PC, I was able to customize specific buttons on the mouse. I assigned one of the buttons to Beyond TV, and another to Beyond Media. In addition to customizing buttons, you are even able to set up what are called “Swipes�. A swipe is a predetermined physical motioning of the mouse that you are able to associate with an event. For example, I can set a swipe to navigate forwards within an internet browser when I motion the air mouse in the rightward direction.

Overall, the gyra suite performed in a way that I had hoped and beyond. The problems I was experiencing related to not having a wireless keyboard and mouse were solved with this little bundle. Also, by taking advantage of some of the perks, the gyra suite even solved problems that were unbeknownst to me at the time of testing. In terms of weaknesses, the only things I could consider weaknesses were 1) the learning curve of getting used to using a mouse in mid-air (which took all of but an hour to get used to), and 2) if you do not keep the mouse cradled in the supplied charging cradle when not in use, the tendency is for the rechargeable battery to expire (at least in my experience).

If you want a solid, durable, high-quality wireless mouse and keyboard bundle, the Gyration Suite is the one for you.

It’s not available online (yet), but Maximum PC wrote a glowing review of Beyond TV in their October 2006 issue. We’re working on getting a copy of the complete article to post on our website, but until then, here are some choice excerpts…

“The bottom line is that Beyond TV is, hands down, the best PVR software we’ve tested for the PC”

“SnapStream’s Beyond TV is the closest thing to a Tivo we’ve tested”

“…unlike MythTV, Beyond TV is easy to install and configure on any Windows machine.”

So I think it’s safe to say that Maximum PC ♥s Beyond TV.

(and apart from the glowing review of Beyond TV, it has some great tips on building your own HTPC so if you aren’t already a subscriber, pick up a copy at your local news stand)

UPDATE: The full text of the Maximum PC review is now available on our website.

For anyone looking to use Beyond TV to record over-the-air HDTV, Popular Mechanics has an easy-to-read, photo-illustrated guide to setting up your PC.

They miss out on the fact that some PC HDTV tuners are USB-based, like the DVICO FusionHDTV Gold USB, but otherwise the article does a good job. They even use the same HDTV antenna, the silver sensor, that we bundle for free in all of our HDTV tuner kits.

As someone who is always trying to make it easier to understand PC PVR, there are some good queues we (as in SnapStream) can take from this article. Until then, another good resource, even though it’s not quite as simple and user friendly, is the SnapStream HDTV Setup Center.

Beyond TV Link running on a Mac Book Pro with Parallels, check out this video:

(for the uninitiated, Beyond TV Link is the network client to our Beyond TV PVR software — I use it at home, for example, to watch TV, live or recorded, while sitting in bed on my wireless laptop.)

(…and a thank-you to Erik Pettersen of BYOPVR for passing this along!)