SnapStream Blog

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 Our original (and now slightly outdated) how-to on using Beyond TV and the HDHomeRun can be found here.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!

You may have read recently that iTunes is not going to have NBC programming starting with the fall season. This would be a disaster for all of us iPod/iPhone users if it weren’t for the Beyond TV 4.7 Beta that has the capacity to automatically transfer shows into iTunes compatible formats.

4.7 has a plugin that allows recompression to the h.264 format and an rss feed (aka podcast) that makes getting shows into iTunes automatic (which then can automatically sync recordings to your iPod video, iPhone or Apple TV).

Available today, we have a public beta of the upcoming 4.7 release that includes many other sweet new features as well. To download this release, you can join the beta program by signing up at http://beta.snapstream.com

Among the other features:

1. Drive pooling – Allows treating a group of disks as one recording folder
2. DVD burning from Beyond TV Link
3. Community Based Automatic Recordings – record the top shows as reported on http://www.snapstream.net/buzz.aspx
4. Virtual Firefly Nano and Remote Library - control Beyond TV from you iPhone or other web enabled device

Here’s the same list above, with much more detail after the break:
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Build a DVR is a great starting point for anyone looking to build their own home theater PC. If you’re completely new, start with “From PC to DVR in 3 steps”:

Building your own DVR sounds like a job for a computer engineer, right? Try again. Even PC newcomers can put one of these together. In 3 steps, you can take a plain jane PC and revamp it into a working media center.

And once you have everything up and running and you want to get your TV shows to your iPhone or iPod, take a look at their 5-step guide to moving TV shows from your HTPC to your iPhone.

Several months ago, I used my awesome video producing skills (if you could hear me, you would be able to sense the sarcasm) to create a Beyond TV demonstration video overviewing the features and functionality of Beyond TV. One of the most common reactions to the video was, “That’s great and all, but how do I get Beyond TV to actually run on my PC??” This is a very legitimate concern– after all, if you can’t get Beyond TV running on your PC in the first place, what’s the point? Concern duly noted, and action taken! Introducing the Beyond TV Setup Video… the prequel to the Beyond TV Overview Video.
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Blog posting by Dr. Butler Crittenden, San Francisco PC Users Group:

At San Francisco PC Users Group’s May 2007 meeting one of our members and a long-time user of SnapStream’s products, Judy Gaer, made a great presentation about how to configure and use Beyond TV. She also showed us a little of “beyond tv link,” which facilitates watching recorded shows from any computer in the network. Judy’s family has a fast LAN and everyone in the family is into computers and TV, so keeping track and flexibility are essential to her teen sons and the rest of the family.

A shot of Judy at the computer and some of the attendees.

Judy started by making the basic point that Beyond TV works by a regular cable or analog antenna TV port on the computer, but cable makes the process a lot more sophisticated and capable. SnapStream urges that we use a TV tuner card that has a hardware encoder, as this is much faster and does not drain computer resources. But it will work with software encoding if necessary.

Judy’s method of presentation was very resourceful, as the club’s meeting room temporarily lost its broadband connection. She used streaming media shots of the set-up and use of Beyond TV. Thus we had actual talking videos of her using SnapStream — perhaps even better than an on-line, live performance, as she had time to select and hone what she thought was important and would fit into an hour-long presentation. Of course there were lots of questions, and the level of interest was high. Everyone loved the ability to time-shift and skip through commercials. We also marveled that she can make decisions and changes when on the road, and have new programs at home to watch when she returns.

Judy is also familiar with TIVO, and showed us a little of how the two are quite comparable. She likes Beyond TV as the costs are much lower, and there is no monthly hit like TIVO. In her view, and I think that of most of the rest of us, watching TV is so much better with Beyond TV or TIVO that use of one or the other is almost a necessity. There is simply so much to watch that this tool is just about a necessity for busy people who want to be sure to see what they really want to see and skip the rest. And of course of the several raffle items at the end of the meeting, SnapStream’s Beyond TV was the first to be snapped up.

What would you do with a free $671.88 each year?

You could get a new Quad Core cpu or a PS3 (not to mention a Wii AND Xbox 360) or go on a cruise or do like me and buy a new Canon Rebel XT DSLR. Sounds good, right? So where oh where did I find my free Benjamins?

Simple, I got rid of my cable tv.
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