SnapStream Blog

Bart Decanne, who lives outside of Austin in the Texas Hill Country, has quite the SnapStream setup at his home. He has Beyond TV setup in his living room and Beyond TV Link running in two other rooms of the house. Some pictures below:

Bart’s Living Room

The master bedroom

Bart’s Home Office

Thanks for sharing your system with us Bart. And if anyone else out there would like to share your Beyond TV setup with us, just e-mail us at marketing@snapstream.com.

Richard over at FreshArrival.com send me an e-mail to mention a review that he recently did of the new SlingBox AV where he walks through how you can use SlingBox and Beyond TV together to “place shift” recordings made in Beyond TV.

I’m going to print out copies of this article and hand it to every person who says “Oh, is that like SlingBox?”, after I explain to them what SnapStream does. Annoying as this is, I have to hand it to SlingBox for the awareness they’ve generated in a short amount of time.

(Richard at FreshArrival also reviewed Beyond TV 4 a couple of months ago where he concluded: “BeyondTV does everything I’ve asked it to do and more. I highly recommend it.”)

We have a couple of new things we’re announcing today:

Beyond TV 4.5

First, we just began shipping Beyond TV 4.5, a free update for anyone that owns the full version of Beyond TV 4. Like point releases before it, Beyond TV 4.5 contains a number of bug fixes and improvements. One bug fix worth mentioning is the library screens aren’t slow anymore, for users with collections of 100 or more recordings. Another major area of improvement in this new release is the Web Admin, thanks to the community contributions to the shared-source webadmin, in particular the contributions of ccarlin.

As always, this release furthers our goal of making PC DVR something that’s easy — both easy to install and easy to use.

• Read the complete release notes
• See screenshots of the WebAdmin changes
• Download the free upgrade

DVD Burning Plug-in

…and embedded in Beyond TV 4.5 is an optional and exciting new feature — integrated DVD burning. The new DVD Burning Plug-in makes it easy to burn DVDs of your recorded TV shows and movies. Just pop a DVD into your burner, add videos to the DVD in Beyond TV and then click “Burn DVD.” It just works.

Burn to DVD on the main menu in Beyond TV

The main screen for the DVD Burning Plug-in

And the final product is a great looking DVD with all of your show information intact (things like the show name, episode title and original air date) and the menus have the same polished look of the Beyond TV interface. Here’s what the final product looks like:

Some of the technical details on the DVD Burning Plug-in:

• supports pretty much all DVD writing hardware out there
• supports pretty much all types of DVD media and technologies (dual layer, single layer, mini DVDs, DVD-RAM, DVD+R and RW, DVD-R and RW)
• fully licensed by Dolby for Dolby Digital Audio (2-channel) so the sound quality is great
• supports both video DVDs and data DVDs
• supports not only MPEG-2 (program stream) videos, but Windows Media (WMV) and DivX videos as well
• burning happens in the background, while your DVD is burned, you can use Beyond TV (or anything else on your PC)

So how can you get this feature? Well, first of all, you can purchase the DVD Burning Plug-in straight out — just find your Beyond TV 4 product key and head on over to the upgrade center. Or, if you’d prefer, you can try the plug-in before buying it. The plug-in will cost most users $29.99 — the regular price is $39.99. See the FAQ for more details on pricing.

• More about the DVD Burning Plug-in
• DVD Burning Plug-in FAQ
• Take a screenshot tour (hosted on flickr)
• Watch a video demo of DVD Burning Plug-in (hosted on YouTube)

And last but not least, something for new users

Finally, to mark the launch of Beyond TV 4.5 and the DVD Burning Plug-in, we’ve put our top-selling Beyond TV + Hauppauge PVR-150MCE bundle on sale for $99.99 (normal price is $139.99). With Beyond TV and the PVR-150MCE each normally priced at $69.99, we think this is a good deal… so if you’re reading this and don’t have a PC DVR, you can build one now for less than a $100 (and no subscription fees) and even the shipping is free.

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And as usual, the discussion is over in the SnapStream forums — so try out Beyond TV 4.5 and the DVD Burning Plug-in and let us know what you think!

We’re in the process of rolling out the latest version of Beyond TV, version 4.5… Until then, most SnapStream sites will be down. This means you may see some broken images on the blog here and in other places.

Meanwhile, feel free to browse the forums:
http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/

And if you want to chat with others waiting for Beyond TV 4.5, see this thread in the forums. I’m going to make a post there when the new version is release.

There’s a new version of Beyond TV coming this Thursday with some of the usual bug fixes and minor improvements… plus one significant new feature.

Watch this space for the announcement.

For now, I’m deliriously happy to announce that we will finally… FINALLY be replacing the little 10 second video that we’ve always shipped with every copy of Beyond TV with the new release. You decide whether the new video is an improvement.

The new video:

The old video:

I consider myself an authority on PC DVR — the hardware and software required to turn your PC into a TV recording machine. So this weekend, as an experiment, I spent some time creating a search engine for everything related to “PC DVR” using Google’s Custom Search Engine tool. I included websites for every TV tuner card manufacturer, every software product, and every community site that I could think of.

The final product was the PC DVR Search Engine, my first custom search engine. Screenshot below…

Try it out and let me know what you think, here in the comments or over on the forums.

Hopefully, for those of you on a mission to build your own PVR, it proves to be a useful tool.

(In case you are wondering, I don’t make any money off of the ads delivered here nor does SnapStream — it’s purely something I created for fun, something that I hope is useful to… someone. If you consider yourself a PC DVR expert and have some sites you’d like to contribute, volunteer to improve this search engine.)

If you’ve ever wanted to see what’s coming soon in Beyond TV and have a chance to voice your opinion before it’s released, now is your chance.

The Beyond TV beta program is currently accepting new registrations for beta testers.

What’s in it for you? Glad you asked!
1. Downloads of pre-release versions of Beyond TV that have new and cutting edge features.
2. A voice in what happens with new features. The beta program accepts “feature requests” that are seen by the beta and development team.
3. A chance to go on a bug hunt with your fellow enthusiasts, looking for problems in the software before it becomes public.

Right now, we’re currently in the process of testing Beyond TV 4.5 with some very cool new features in it (can’t say what they are to the public ).

If you’re interested in signing up, visit beta.snapstream.com and fill out the registration form. It will give you instant access the newest betas.

Columbus Beta Testers ONLY! If you’re a Columbus tester and would also like to join the Beyond TV beta, email betasignup at snapstream dot com with the username of your account

To all the early adopters out there, we have an opportunity to test our newest creation that’s currently in beta.

Columbus is a web-based TV community and listings website that we’re creating here at SnapStream Media. The main focus at the current time is on creating a simple to use and uncluttered TV guide experience. Once we’ve polished that off, we’re going to start adding the community based features.

In the long run, the site will also function as a replacement for SnapStream.net and be integrated with Beyond TV, but currently is running standalone.

If you’re in the United States and are interested in beta testing the site, please fill out this survey. Expect to see an approval in your email within the next few days (as long as you don’t work for a competitor ).

(Current SnapStream beta testers should use the email address they have signed up for the beta program when filling out the survey.)

I have worked for SnapStream for the past 6 years and they are finally letting me get out of the office. Now that I have the opportunity, I tried to think of the farthest place to go for a bit. That’s right, Australia!

My name is Alfonso. I am the Director of Engineering at SnapStream. Although I love our products, I work to support my first love, playing ultimate frisbee. I have been playing competitive ultimate frisbee for 11 years now.

What is ultimate frisbee? It’s a sport that involves a lot of athletic individuals running and diving in pursuit of a frisbee. For more information, check out this helpful page on the Doublewide web site. (http://www.austinultimate.org/doublewide/resources.html).

My main team, Doublewide, has finished in the top 10 (out of 300+) in the country the past 3 years in a row. That is no easy feat. In addition to playing with Doublewide, I play on a beach ultimate frisbee team, No Tsu Oh, that has won 5 of the last 7 beach World Championships. The beach championships are held annually at a tournament called Paganello in Rimini, Italy.

Doublewide 2005

So, why am I going to Australia? To play ultimate frisbee, of course. From November 11-19, the World Ultimate Club Championships will be held in Perth, Australia. These championships happen once every four years and are held at various locations around the world. The tournament is played on grass and consists of the best teams from countries around the globe. This year’s field will include around 20 teams from 5 of the 7 continents. Doublewide qualified for the event with an 8th place finish at nationals in 2005. Ever since then, we have been working hard both on and off the field to make it a successful trip. In addition to training four nights a week, we have been fundraising to help pay for the expenses of the trip. SnapStream was kind enough to support my habit with a generous donation and I am very grateful for it.

Teammate Roscoe Dick lays out for the disc.

So I must admit, SnapStream let’s me out of the office come frisbee time. I am psyched that they are helping me get to Australia, and I am looking forward to playing some frisbee down under.

Here are some links to find out more about my teams and the tourneys that we play in.

Doublwide: http://www.austinultimate.org/doublewide/index.html

Worlds: http://www.wucc2006.org/

No Tsu Oh: http://notsuoh.vcultimate.com/

Paganello (Beach world championships): http://www.paganello.com/

Chris Tew over at PVRWire posted a story about how to build your own Windows PVR with Beyond TV. It covers the basics so if you’re planning to build your own PVR with Beyond TV, check it out.