SnapStream Blog

Last week the guys over at Missing Remote wrote an in-depth and comprehensive review on the latest features of Beyond TV 4.7. Here are some of the highlights:

iTunes Integration:
This feature allows users to automatically sync their recorded shows from BTV to their iphone or ipod.

“Snapstream has done a great job with their initial offering of iTunes Auto-Syncing. Things are straight forward and easy to configure. Once you have configured everything and added the RSS feeds to your podcasts in iTunes, things will pretty much take care of themselves.�

Firefly Mobile:
This new application allows you to turn your iphone, smartphone, or PDA into a remote for your BTV.

“This can be a very handy way to get remote control access to a pc without having to buy an IR receiver and a remote. This could also be useful for those that have a touchscreen setup and want to use the second display/touchscreen to act as a remote control.�

Community Recordings:
Enabling community recordings allows for your BTV to automatically schedule and record the most popular shows as per the Beyond TV user community.

“I think the opportunity for this add-on to shine will be during the off season when I never know what’s decent on tv.â€?

Conclusion:
“With all this new capability, BeyondTV continues to be a strong contender in the Home Theater PC PVR market. If you’re about to build your own HTPC, or you’ve been thinking about trying something different you should definitely give BeyondTV 4.7 a try.â€?

Checkout Missing Remote for the complete review.

Lifehacker’s Adam Pash wrote an excellent article two years ago about how to install a PCI TV tuner card in your PC. Two years later, it’s still a great resource for anyone who’s never cracked open their PC before and wants to build their own DVR.

So head over to the SnapStream Store and get yourself a Beyond TV and Hauppauge HVR-1600 bundle (my recommendation because the HVR-1600 a) is a dual tuner TV card — you can record both one analog channel and one over-the-air digital channel at the same time, b) includes an IR blaster with code library, so you if you want to record from your digital cable or satellite signal, it’ll tune your set-top box, and c) has a hardwareMPEG-2 encoder, so the heavy lifting of encoding the analog signal is handled by the TV card and not by your computer’s CPU). And then use Adam’s trusty guide to get the TV tuner card installed. As Adam writes in the article:

Sound scary? Be not afraid. Installing hardware in your computer is not as difficult as it may seem. In fact, installing a PCI card is a relatively simple and painless process.

(And in case you’re reading this Adam: you should try the latest version of Beyond TV… we think you’ll like it.)

Note: Zack’s opinions don’t necessarily match those of SnapStream.
Before I worked for SnapStream, I read computer and car magazines as the gospel. If it was in print, I simply believed it. When a reviewer told me what the best card/software/car was, I had total faith that I had been told the whole story.

But what I didn’t know is that there is a secret, sometimes seedy, underworld to reviews.
(more…)

Wal-mart announced today what I am naming “Orange Friday”. Basically, they are making deals that you would normally to see on the black Friday after Thanksgiving, and putting them on sale the Friday after Halloween.

Of note, they have a $1000 50′ Plasma and $100 HD-DVD player (which beats my estimate of a $150 player on black friday).

For us techno-geeks, this is a pretty significant move. Walmart basically just increased the sweet-spot of deals from one month long to two months each holiday season.

It’s pretty easy to guess that if this works, the “holiday shopping season” is going to start right after Halloween next year as well.

So who’s lining up tonight out in the cold to pick up an hd-dvd player?