SnapStream Blog

If you’re at the National Association of Broadcaster’s 2008 tradeshow in Las Vegas next week, be sure and come by our booth in the South Upper Hall (Booth #SU6008). And just to make sure you don’t get lost on the way there, we’ve put together some maps and directions.

See you there!

Since there’s been some excitement about the upcoming Hauppauge HD PVR product, I thought I’d share some photographs of Hauppauge’s new product “in the lab” here at SnapStream:

Here’s a photograph of the Hauppauge HD PVR prototype board itself — everyone had to be careful to ground themselves before handling it.

Here’s another pic of the HD PVR all wired up to a digital source via component video cables (those are the blue, green and red cables).

This one shows the HD PVR in action — the red light means Beyond TV is busy making a recording off this thing when the photograph was taken.

The final product — some good ‘ol baseball recorded on the Hauppauge HD PVR in Beyond TV

A close-up of the same frame (I took it without a flash, holding the camera in my hand, so there might be a slight blur)

A few months ago, we added a new plug-in into Beyond TV that allows you to pretty easily move anything playing on television onto any video-capable Apple device (i.e. an iPhone, iPod, or an Apple TV).

Once you go through the initial setup, Beyond TV’s H.264 integration should make it simple and automatic to get your favorite TV shows onto your Apple device.

I created this video to show you how it all works, all the way from getting the right hardware for Beyond TV and setting up your PC through plugging your iPhone or iPod into your PC and having iTunes magically copy all of your latest TV shows onto it. Hope you enjoy the video and find it useful!

There’s been a groundswell of interest in the Hauppauge HD PVR device, ever since Hauppauge announced it at CES in early January. I first heard about the device from Hauppauge on a visit to their offices in Hauppauge, NY back in November 2007. Since then, I’ve learned quite a bit more about the device. We’re taking a lot of interest in this new device, but until we actual get a test unit, we can’t say whether or not we’ll support it.

For those of you who haven’t heard about the new device, I’ll briefly recap its capabilities: it’ll take in component video (you know, the red, green, and blue cables on the back of your cable or satellite set-top box — the ones that can carry an HD signal) and encode it to H.264 at up to 25 Mbit/s. And it includes Hauppauge’s standard IR blaster with code library.

Anyways, here is some of what I know about it:

• Hauppauge’s calling it the HD PVR — for now. The name may change before it’s released.
• It can accept component video in (see a picture) up to 1080p
• It can encode that component video to H.264 transport streams (in hardware)
• The hardware itself is basically done — Hauppauge’s just waiting on the final case design (and Chinese New Year has slowed this down)
• It includes the same Hauppauge IR blaster & code library included with other Hauppauge products
• It’s based on a chip from a company called Ambarella (http://www.ambarella.com/)
• It’s an all-in-one chip that has a digitizer and H.264 encoder
• A similar chip from Ambarella happens to be used in popular HD camcorders
• The compression data rates works between 1 Mbit/s and 25 Mbit/s
• The H.264 encoder outputs H.264 transport streams
• The Ambarella chip also has an H.264 decoder and the Hauppauge HD PVR will ship with a video out, but…
• The video out function will more than likely NOT be activated when the HD PVR ships (and possibly never, for reasons relating to the Ambarella driver)
• You’ll need a relatively powerful PC to playback these recordings
• Hauppauge is still making some tweaks to the HD PVR’s drivers as well
• Hauppauge expects for the product to be shipping before the end of this quarter (ie before March 31, 2008)

(Note: the image above is NOT the device — it’s just a set-top box with some component video cables. I’ve requested some photographs and will hopefully have some soon.)

(Note #2: All of the information above was posted *with* permission from Hauppauge — specifically, Ken Plotkin reviewed a draft and gave me the green light to post it.)

Scott, at Techory.com, writes a post on Entertainment PC Software (Feb 2, 2008):

“…BeyondTV is just a cleaner interface, and has a few more bells and whistles built in…”

“…the DVR area is a space where there are a lot of contenders making products, but so far BeyondTV has topped the list of products I’ve tried.”

(A few days ago, Scott also wrote about his experiences Adding HDTV to his HTPC with Beyond TV and the HDHomeRun)

…And on chron.com’s TechBlog, Jim Thompson writes about how technology makes the superbowl more enjoyable and in the comments writes:

“For re-living a game, a PVR is a big plus. I have several of my alma mater’s big games from the past two seasons stored on my homebrew BeyondTV system.”

Grant (btvfreak in the forums) has updated his how-to on using Beyond TV with the SiliconDust HDHomeRun to reflect changes that SiliconDust has made to their setup process.

For those that are new to building their own PC DVR, the HDHomeRun is a great TV tuner if you want to use Beyond TV to record the unencrypted channels on your digital cable feed. Our original (and now slightly outdated) how-to on using Beyond TV and the HDHomeRun can be found here.

From the creative mind of such posts as Beyond TV Hearts iTunes and iPhone, Top 10 reasons I heart my over-the-air antenna, TV Viewers Bill of Rights and much more we bring you Zack Price.

Lead tester of all things SnapStream and self-proclaimed tech guru, Zack will give us an inside look at the thought process behind Beyond TV 4.7’s iTunes® Integration feature. To bring those of you who might be unaware of this feature up to speed, the iTunes® Integration feature allows Beyond TV users to automatically sync their recorded TV shows to their iPods and iPhones.

So, sit back and relax as Zack takes us down the unbeaten path where developers and testers come to amends with the technology that is iTunes® Integration.

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.)

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!