SnapStream Blog

There comes a time in a homeowners life when he realizes the importance of being able to play full high-definition content from his neighbor’s house 5 doors down… wirelessly.

Never mind the fact that getting the needed 20mbit sustained wireless connection for HD inside of a single house is difficult. The prospect of playing Music, DVDs and even full resolution HDTV between houses is just too tempting.

This is our story.

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This review is the third in a series of product reviews written by the SnapStream community members. This review is of Beyond TV Link written by Peter, pwlong in the forums.

Me: “Hey, honey — check this out: I’m watching TV on my computer!”

Few statements concerning PC technology generate any interest from my wife, and this time was no different. While I was thoroughly excited by my discovery of Beyond TV’s ability to time-shift broadcast TV, she saw past my epiphany and spotted the proverbial fly-in-the-ointment immediately:

My Wife: "That’s great. Too bad you’ve gotta watch it in there, all by yourself."

I was so excited about the software, I scarcely heard her response. But after fiddling around with Beyond TV for just a few hours, I had to admit she was right on the mark. What good was a PC-based VCR if you could only watch it from the PC? We certainly weren’t going to drag the couch into the den and sit huddled around the monitor to watch our favorite shows. And there was simply no way my wife would approve of relocating the hulking chassis of my homebuilt "Franken-puter" into the family room, with its messy entourage of peripherals, dongles and an antenna along for the ride – no matter what it could do for us. From a WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) perspective, it couldn’t get any worse.

Was the fun over before it had even started? Was this software missing a key architectural component, vital to its useability? Will saving the cheerleader actually save the world? Uh, wait — different topic — sorry about that…

Enter Beyond TV Link.

Beyond TV Link is the client component of SnapStream Media’s Beyond TV application, which was designed to do what the name implies: link any client PC directly to a Beyond TV server, requesting video streams from the server and extending the core functionality to the 10-foot (couch-to-TV) interface. By combining Beyond TV Link with any PC, you can build a scalable, distributed DVR network to serve up time-shifted video-on-demand to any location in your home. So let’s fire it up, and see how well it works in practice, with that elusive WAF hanging in the balance, and my entire "home IT department" budget at stake.

  
Peter’s Beyond TV Link laptop

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I’m the designer at SnapStream and I was recently invited to participate in the 9th Annual American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Student Portfolio Review at the Museum of Printing History. Every year, design students from Houston and surrounding cities come to have their portfolio critiqued by professionals in the field like me. This was my third year attending this event and every year I have been impressed by the work being produced.

Many students come from the University of Houston Graphic Communications Program, which was the very same program I graduated from 6 some-odd years ago. Talking with these soon-to-be graduates, who seemed perfectly comfortable showing their work off to total strangers, made me remember when I was in their place. When I was a student, I stayed up all night putting the finishing touches on my portfolio and writing down everything I wanted to say so that when the time came, I was ready for anything. Once I got used to the process of explaining my work to seasoned designers, I became more comfortable and confident as the day went on.

A former classmate of mine, Brian Gossett (left), gives his advice for the students at the event.

The first year I participated as a professional, I wondered how candid I was supposed to be. There is nothing more frustrating, as a designer, than to get comments like “I don’t like it� without an explanation. When I went through this process as a student, it was very common for a reviewer to give generic, “looks good� comments which, in hind-sight, didn’t benefit my growth at all. I wanted to show more respect to the students I reviewed. I went in with the belief that the criticism needed to be constructive so that the students would gain something from the experience. Hopefully, I was able to provide some real influence on their progress of their design careers.

Another former classmate, Johnny Luu (right), listening intently as a student describes her work.

Several us from the SnapStream team are here in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcasters tradeshow. Stop by and see us — we’re in the Las Vegas Convention Center in the South Upper Hall towards the back… come in the South Upper Hall entrance and follow the wall on the left back to booth SU13310. We’re showing off some new stuff that’s part of our developing enterprise division. Here’s a photo of our booth:

As an added bonus, we have this spacious rest area right next to and across from our booth with four park benches where you can have a seat and rest your feet. And we’re offering up a free high-strength wi-fi connection from our booth. There’s even a restroom half an aisle away! So stop by, see our stuff and take a break.

I’ve been meaning to write a blog posting about Beyond TV’s remote recording feature that lets you schedule recordings while you’re away from home, but there are only so many hours in the day, right?

Well, lucky for me Brent Evans has gone and done the work for me in his blog posting on how to schedule recordings from your mobile phone or the Internet.

Here are my cliff notes:
- Using the web, login at http://www.snapstream.net/
- Using your mobile phone, login at http://mobile.snapstream.net/
- Don’t have a login? Re-run the Beyond TV setup wizard (you’ll find it in your start menu) and create one on this page.

This is one of Beyond TV’s capabilities that I feel we’ve always underpromoted so I’m glad to finally be getting this out there. If you didn’t know about it before, hope you like it!

The web-based interface for scheduling recordings on your Beyond TV PC DVR (http://www.snapstream.net)

…and the mobile interface for scheduling remote recordings (http://mobile.snapstream.net)

Late last week, began shipping a small update to Beyond TV… version 4.6.1. Here’s what’s new, from the release notes:

Bug Fixes

– Recordings failing due to, “Could not attach to graph” error are no longer failing.
– Setup wizard now detects sound devices for software encode TV tuner cards.
– TV format settings now correctly being saved as NTSC or PAL in the Web Admin.
– AVerMedia M780 PCI express TV tuner now capable of using both of its onboard tuners simultaneously.
– Serial tuning satellite and set-top-boxes on COM ports higher than 9 can now be done.
– Meta-data no longer lost when copying video files.
– Manual recordings no longer being ended prematurely when the Beyond TV recording scheduler is rebuilt.
– Manual recordings made within the Beyond TV GUI are now being scheduled on the correct channel in cases where duplicate channels exist in a person’s lineup.

Improvements

– Library monitoring and performance improved.
– HDHomeRun (ATSC and QAM support) now supported.
– Serial tuning for DirecTV D11 Model 500 now supported.

The most significant feature in this release is support for unencrypted QAM… What is unencrypted QAM and what does it mean that Beyond TV supports it now?

I’ll elaborate in another blog posting, but in short, it means you can watch and record some of the channels on your cable connection in their pure digital form and, depending on the channel and programming, in high-definition as well. Getting this working does require some specific hardware and to get everything setup, but if this survey is any indication, this won’t deter many of you. Enjoy!

Existing Beyond TV 4 users: Get your free update to Beyond TV 4.6.1

For everyone else, download the free 21-day trial

(and if you’ve tried Beyond TV or the DVD Burning Plug-in before, you’ll get a new 21-day trial period with Beyond TV 4.6.1)