SnapStream Blog

One of the new features under-the-hood of Beyond TV 4.7 is automatic line-up change detection. More than likely, at one point or another, your cable or satellite provider has changed your channel line-up on you. In one example, when Comcast recently took over Time Warner’s cable business here in Houston, they made a bunch of line-up changes:

In an effort to more closely group channels by genre, Comcast adjusted the location of several networks in the channel lineup. Last week, the following networks moved channel position while remaining in the same level of service: TBS (to Channel 51 from 31), Spike TV (to Channel 68 from 32), The Golf Channel (to Channel 32 from 68), ABC Family (to Channel 48 from 70), Court TV (to Channel 67 from 71), FX (to Channel 31 from 72) and MSNBC (to Channel 80 from 73). WE TV is now part of the Digital Classic lineup on Channel 350 and was previously part of Standard Cable on Channel 48.

Prior to Beyond TV 4.7, changes like this would go undetected. You’d have to know about the change and then you’d have to manually reset your line-up using the Beyond TV Setup Wizard. Now, Beyond TV automatically detects these changes and reconfigures your line-up and recordings so they get made from the right channel.

For example, this morning Beyond TV detected a bunch of new channels on my cable line-up and gave me these notifications:

iPhone Matters published a review of Beyond TV today. My favorite part of his review is the part where he writes about the Beyond TV scheduler:

Snapstream has paid a lot of attention to this piece of software, and it shows. I went crazy picking shows to record and at some point I lost track of all my recordings. I recorded Judge Judy, but there was another show that I wanted to record on Animal Planet called Profiles of Nature. I knew Judge Judy had already been set to record at 4EST, but I went ahead and set Profiles of Nature to record also, just to see what happens. I haven’t seen a “conflict� message yet, and wanted to see how it handled it. I clicked record on Profiles of Nature at 4EST and nothing happen. Knowing that I had already set Judge Judy to record, I was a little stunned, so I check to see if that was still going to be recorded and it was still set to record at 4. To my surprise, it had realized that there was a time conflict, looked to see if the same episode was playing later on and just set that one to record instead. Magnificent!

You know how sometimes you work really extra hard think no one noticed….. Well the development and business sides of SnapStream worked their collective butts off getting the Beyond TV 4.7 release out the door (passersby wondered, “where did their butts go”). Then a week or so passed and we were informed that we’d each get a new iPhone or iPod Touch to go along with the H.264 plugin we made for Beyond TV. The last of the devices just got here in the mail and we took a group picture to show our smiling faces and shiny new toys.

SnapStreamers Squinting in the Sun

If you’ve read the other articles in the More Power To Us series, you know that the SnapStream co-location facility has a good amount of drive space.

Sometimes, however, it’s not size that matters. In this case, we’re upgrading our backend DB server with some faster (and slightly larger) disks.

For your viewing pleasure….

A case of 15,000 RPM 36gb SCSI U320 Disks

Best part about it, the entire box cost around $600 (including buying a number of spares. Since we really don’t need a huge about of raw space, we could go back a generation or two in terms of size and still get the speed we need. I’ll get a number on transfer rates when we install it, but I expect it to be between ridiculous and ludicrous.

Call me cheap, but I tend to use Beyond TV to save money… like by ditching cable tv or by recompressing shows to my iPhone instead of buying them on the iTunes store .

So here we go again, this time I take on the “boxed set dvd” release of a tv show that just aired.
There are two main problems with boxed sets as I see it.

1. They are expensive.
2. They aren’t guaranteed to be release at any specific time (or at all)

Hand made DVD sets from last season

The start of the Fall TV Season is a great time to start building a collection of your favorite shows. Or maybe you don’t know what your favorites will be, so just record everything.
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