SnapStream Blog

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

Installation and Setup

I had an older work laptop laying around, with low-end integrated video and "only" 512mb of memory. Although it met the minimum requirements for Beyond TV Link, I was skeptical about it being up to the task of handling streaming video, but as it was the only spare PC I had available as a guinea pig, I decided to give it a try. Since SnapStream offers a full-featured, 21-day trial of all their software, I felt confident I could evaluate Link pretty exhaustively before deciding whether or not to plunk down cash for a license. I began by installing Beyond TV Link on the laptop:

The Link software installation proceeded smoothly. First, if your machine is lacking Microsoft’s .NET Runtime 1.1 or DirectX9 packages, they will be auto-downloaded and installed prior to the Link install. My test laptop already had both packages installed, so the Link install took less than 60 seconds to complete, with no reboot required. Next, the installer asks whether you’d like to begin the 21-day trial or enter a Link license key. Once the installation is complete and Link started up, it promptly detected my Beyond TV server, and I was prompted to connect or cancel. This struck me as rather odd: if only a single server is detected on the local network, I’d expect to be auto-connected to that server, rather than being prompted. The workaround is to modify the Link shortcut to include the hostname or IP address of the Beyond TV server on the command-line, which then auto-connects Link to the server every time it starts.

It takes between 5 and 10 seconds for Link to connect to the server, at which point the "Home" screen of the Beyond TV Link Viewscape — SnapStream’s name for the Beyond TV user interface — is displayed. (Note that the following two screenshots were taken from a trial installation of Beyond TV Link, while the rest are from a licensed copy.)

With the exception of the hostname (or IP address) of the Beyond TV server to which Link is connected, which is displayed in the upper right corner, and the "Beyond TV Link" icon in the upper left, the Link ViewScape is virtually identical to the Beyond TV "Home" screen. The Link ViewScape is very responsive, and feels like being directly on the Beyond TV server console: there is no perceptible lag or communication delay between Link and server. You can run the Viewscape in either windowed or full-screen mode, with full-screen being the obvious choice for a dedicated HTPC. Under the View menu, you’ll find the option for locking the Viewscape aspect ratio to either 4:3 (shown above) or 16:9 (shown below), enabling you to match up Link’s aspect ratio with the native ratio of the attached TV/monitor.

The "Exit the Beyond TV ViewScape" option can be removed via a registry setting, if desired. The "Upgrade Beyond TV Link" option and "Days Left" reminders both disappear once you activate (purchase and enter) a Link license key. One nice touch is that the menu font auto-scales to fill the menu area: after removal of the "Exit…" and "Upgrade…" menu options, the font size for remaining menu items increases proportionally, making them even more visible. Just as with Beyond TV, the red dot in the lower right corner appears whenever any recording is in progress, disappearing once all recordings have completed. This "recording" indicator also briefly appears on all active ViewScapes whenever a recording begins, which I found to be neither helpful nor annoying — it’s just reassuring to know that Beyond TV is doing what you’ve asked it to. If network connectivity to the server is interrupted or lost, Link displays a disconnected power cord icon in the lower right until connectivity is restored.

The Moment of Truth

After getting aquainted with the Link layout, I was ready to test playback of real broadcast content captured from my Hauppauge WinTV-PVR150MCE analog tuner. I fired up "Live TV" and watched as playback started; it took 5-7 seconds for the "Starting video" message to be replaced by the playback video stream. With Link using all default settings, I was surprised at how smooth playback was, and at how similar the laptop display looked to the regular TV, once the show info "HUD" (Heads-Up Display) disappeared. Even more impressive was the fact that I was viewing Live TV over my wireless-G (802.11g) network:

I was impressed enough by the quality of the default SnapStream video decoder that I dug around for an S-video cable, so I could connect the S-video output on the laptop to my 27″ TV. “Sure…” I thought. “The picture looks great on the laptop LCD, but I bet it’s gonna suck on my 6-year old Panasonic CRT”. I hooked the laptop to the TV, fiddled briefly with the ATI display drivers to force video-out via S-video, fired up playback of an existing recording of "24", then flopped down on the couch to see what I could find to criticize about the image quality.

Twenty minutes later, my wife joined me on the couch to check out the show. She watched for several minutes, with no idea that anything had changed, until I suddenly paused playback and headed into the kitchen for a snack:

My Better Half: “So what’s the deal? What’d you do to the TV?”

Me: “I paused it.”

My Better Half: “How?”

Me: “It’s a PC-based VCR thing I’m experimenting with. It records TV shows to the hard drive, so you can watch ‘em later, whenever you want. The laptop is actually playing back the TV show."

My Better Half: (no comment while she’s checking out the paused image of Jack Bauer – but I can tell what she’s thinking)

Me: "It’s pretty geeky, really. I’m just trying it out — you know, to see if it works.”

MBH: “Can it do that for my shows, too?”

Folks, when it’s that simple to convince your wife that technology is a Good Thing(tm), you know you’ve got a special product on your hands. Once my wife realized that Beyond TV could work for her as a digital VCR, and that Link would enable her to view recorded content wherever she wanted, she was hooked. She asked me to setup a machine that would enable her to watch shows while running on the treadmill in our basement. It didn’t take us long to realize we needed something besides the keyboard for ViewScape control: ever try using a laptop touchpad while running at 7mph? I added SnapStream’s FireFly remote control (sorry, that’s another review) to the laptop, and she was literally off and running. I started to think my home IT budget might actually survive this experiment after all.

Features

While it may sound like a cliche, Beyond TV Link worked "right out of the box". If you’re at all familiar with Beyond TV, then Beyond TV Link will take you no time at all to get used to. And although the Link ViewScape gives you access to just about every configuration option available in the Beyond TV ViewScape, only a handful of settings really need tweaking. The video decoder is probably the leading configuration parameter to be tweaked on LINK, since it has the most direct impact on image quality and performance. By switching among the various MPEG-2 decoders detected by Beyond TV Link, you can evaluate which decoder offers the best image quality, performance and stability. The video rendering mode is set to overlay by default, but can be switched to 3D-accelerated mode for "advanced animation and transparency effects", which is really only useful if the Link machine has a relatively new GPU capable of hardware video acceleration. As with Beyond TV, there’s a calibration screen for precise adjustments to the placement of the Beyond TV playback area:

From Link, you can access the show-scheduling and search menus, just as you would on the Beyond TV server. You can also tweak the ViewScape layout and behavior, specifically EPG (Electronic Program Guide) parameters like the number of rows/columns, guide jump interval, screensaver timeout and sound effects. On traditional 4:3 displays, you’ll definitely want to adust the number of rows/columns in the Guide, for the same reason you might opt to add more columns on a 16:9 display, since it’s obviously wider.

Recorded shows can be watched, deleted, or submitted to the ShowSqueeze transcoding post-processing engine. Commercial transitions detected by SmartSkip, Beyond TV’s integrated ad-skipping engine, are available within Link, and are clearly highlighted in a different color on the HUD:

These ad markers are easily navigable in Link, using the remote control: when playback reaches a commercial break, simply tap the "Up" arrow on the FireFly to skip to the next commercial-program transition. In this fashion, I can watch a 30-minute show in 22 minutes, a 60-minute show in 44-minutes, and a 3-hour Saturday night movie in just under two hours — all without watching a single ad. Live TV can be watched, paused, rewound, and optionally recorded on-the-fly. You can search for upcoming recordings from any Link machine, as well as forcing an update of the EPG (Electronic Program Guide) or downloading any remotely scheduled recordings that you’ve enqueued on the SnapStream.NET website. Recording conflicts can also be resolved within Link, and Beyond TV warning messages, indicated by a yellow triangle icon, can be reviewed and dismissed from within Link.

One particularly nice benefit of running multiple Link machines is playback continuity: Beyond TV keeps track of where in the show you halt playback, and allows you to resume playback from that point, regardless of which Link you’re watching. So I can start watching a show in the family room, then pause playback to take the family out to dinner (kids whine if you don’t feed ‘em). Later that evening, after the kids are off to bed with full bellies, I can resume watching the same show — from exactly where I left off, which I can’t even remember on my own — on any Link machine in the house. Very handy. How much does that feature cost with the cable- and satellite-provided DVR setups?

Performance, Stability and Scalability

Link performance is good enough to fool you into forgetting about the back-end server. Since my wife signed off on the budget for a distributed PVR network, I’ve added several Link machines, and switched from analog (NTSC) to 100% digital (ATSC) tuners. Most demos of my Beyond TV setup result in the same question from guests, as they point at my HTPC: "So that’s the DVR?". When I tell them that no, the server lives downstairs in the unfinished basement, and this PC is simply one of several independent front-end Link clients, they’re amazed at how quick it is:

"Wow. That’s pretty slick…and (navigation is) really fast — way faster than my Comcastic DVR."

I then proceed to demonstrate the Options menu, where image attributes (brightness, contrast, gamma, aspect ratio and deinterlacing) and speaker output modes can be changed; then I show off the spiffy transparent guide, available only in 3D-accelerated mode thanks to the GeForce 7600GS card in my Zalman HD160 HTPC Link machine:

I show them how the LINK machine has the bare essentials: fanless graphics card, small quiet disk drive, audio out to the speakers/receiver, gigabit ethernet and USB remote receiver. I show them how all the Beyond TV functionality is made available through LINK, and that since it’s not actually the recording server, the Link client can actually go into standby mode, if desired, when not in use.

Although each additional link requires a separate license, you can still add as many of them as your server will support, from a system loading perspective. Since the Beyond TV architecture is client-server, the Beyond TV server is essentially a fileserver for Link clients, which are simply requesting video files across the network for local display. On my 100mbit network, with a 2.8GHz CPU in the Beyond TV server pushing the video bits across the wire, I was able to serve 1080i video streams to four PCs running Beyond TV Link, with each consuming approximately 19mbits/sec of bandwidth. At that rate, my server could feed five clients before the network became the bottleneck. Upgrading to a gigabit switch would likely shift the bottleneck back to the CPU in my aging server before I could saturate the network.

In the case of Live TV, each instance of a Link client watching Live TV consumes one tuner, so the number of LINK machines watching Live TV is limited to the number of idle tuners in the server.

Beyond TV Link has proven to be very stable application. Manipulating video, especially HD video, is one of the most demanding activies you can undertake on a PC besides FPS gaming, and Beyond TV has proven to handle it well. In all the hours of use my Link machines have seen over the past year, I don’t recall ever seeing Beyond TV Link crash. During the trial period for a competing (Java-based) PVR application, I experienced several crashes in just the first few hours of use.

HDTV and Beyond TV Link

When using Link to play back content recorded from a digital (ATSC) tuner, it’s important to make sure the Link client hardware meets a realistic minimum spec to handle HD content. With lower-end hardware, you risk stuttering and skipping problems, simply due to the high-bandwidth and high bitrates associated with HD recordings. It’s also inadvisable to attempt to playback HD content over a wireless network, as you’d need an amped-up, boosted 802.11g setup over a relatively short range to have any hope of avoiding a network bottleneck. Fast ethernet (100BASE-TX) is the minimum required bandwidth for serving 1080 broadcast streams to up to five Link clients concurrently, while gigabit ethernet (1000BASE-T) would be required to serve the same content to six or more clients. Video cards that support hardware-accelerated playback are your best bet for "smooth-as-glass" HD playback, but both the video decoder and graphics driver also play a big part there too. If your graphics card isn’t up to the task, the CPU will need enough horsepower to pick up the slack.

The recipe for smooth HD playback on a Link client appears to be:

• CPU: minimum 2GHz, multi-core preferred
• Dedicated DirectX9-capable graphics card: minimum of nVidia 6600 or ATI 9600
• Onboard (integrated) graphics: Intel’s GMA950 is the only integrated GPU known to support smooth playback of HD content
• Wired 100mbit ethernet

Quite a few off-the-shelf PCs meet these requirements, but an increasing number are available in small-form-factor (SFF) or ultra-small-form-factor (USFF) configurations, which are ideally suited for placement near TVs in the home, while remaining
inconspicuous.

Summary and Conclusion

So now that I’d seen firsthand how Beyond TV Link enables "place-shifting" of the recorded content to any PC within my home, what’s the verdict? Does Beyond TV Link deliver on its promise well enough to be an essential complement to Beyond TV? And is it worth the cost?

My answer is an emphatic "yes".

The strength of Beyond TV Link lies in the control, convenience and stability it offers. It truly does extend the Beyond TV user interface so seamlessly that users see no difference when using Beyond TV Link in the family room, bedroom or home theater. For families with multiple users, especially those who aren’t technophiles at heart and just want things "to work", the simplicity and ease of use offered by Link is really the key selling point, and a deal-maker. Couple that with Link’s engineered compatibility with Beyond TV itself, which has proven to be well-designed and implemented, makes it possible to deploy multiple Links on identical hardware with confidence that things will continue to "just work".

The trade-off for all this confidence and compatibility is the licensing cost of $30 per Link. And someone will always ask: "Why do you need Beyond TV Link? You could just as easily map a network drive to the Beyond TV server and play these recordings using Windows Media Player or VLC player, can’t you? Or why not go with one of the various media extenders available, some of which even support a skinnable UI and HD playback?"

The point isn’t that there aren’t viable alternatives to Link, but that they usually only offer a subset of Link functionality. Those who opt for those alternatives have to be willing to forego some of the bells and whistles — access to Live TV, SmartSkip markers, playback continuity between Links, show scheduling capability — in order just watch their content. But for those of us who just want to enjoy Beyond TV to the fullest, those alternatives just aren’t going to cut it.

As good as the current Link is, however, there’s always room for improvement. While testing Link for this review, and using it extensively over the past several releases, there are a handful of potential features that, if added, would truly distinguish Beyond TV Link from the rest of the field:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 3:55 pm by Rakesh and is filed under Beyond TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.