SnapStream Blog

I just heard about this: you can tune into the Fine Living Channel tonight at 7pm or 10pm (central time) and see SnapStream’s Beyond TV featured on Tech Check. And if you miss it tonight, you can catch it later this month because I understand they’ll be re-playing it at least once before Christmas. P.S. I’m also working on a getting a copy that I can share with everyone here online.

We have a couple of new things we’re announcing today:

Beyond TV 4.5

First, we just began shipping Beyond TV 4.5, a free update for anyone that owns the full version of Beyond TV 4. Like point releases before it, Beyond TV 4.5 contains a number of bug fixes and improvements. One bug fix worth mentioning is the library screens aren’t slow anymore, for users with collections of 100 or more recordings. Another major area of improvement in this new release is the Web Admin, thanks to the community contributions to the shared-source webadmin, in particular the contributions of ccarlin.

As always, this release furthers our goal of making PC DVR something that’s easy — both easy to install and easy to use.

• Read the complete release notes
• See screenshots of the WebAdmin changes
• Download the free upgrade

DVD Burning Plug-in

…and embedded in Beyond TV 4.5 is an optional and exciting new feature — integrated DVD burning. The new DVD Burning Plug-in makes it easy to burn DVDs of your recorded TV shows and movies. Just pop a DVD into your burner, add videos to the DVD in Beyond TV and then click “Burn DVD.” It just works.

Burn to DVD on the main menu in Beyond TV

The main screen for the DVD Burning Plug-in

And the final product is a great looking DVD with all of your show information intact (things like the show name, episode title and original air date) and the menus have the same polished look of the Beyond TV interface. Here’s what the final product looks like:

Some of the technical details on the DVD Burning Plug-in:

• supports pretty much all DVD writing hardware out there
• supports pretty much all types of DVD media and technologies (dual layer, single layer, mini DVDs, DVD-RAM, DVD+R and RW, DVD-R and RW)
• fully licensed by Dolby for Dolby Digital Audio (2-channel) so the sound quality is great
• supports both video DVDs and data DVDs
• supports not only MPEG-2 (program stream) videos, but Windows Media (WMV) and DivX videos as well
• burning happens in the background, while your DVD is burned, you can use Beyond TV (or anything else on your PC)

So how can you get this feature? Well, first of all, you can purchase the DVD Burning Plug-in straight out — just find your Beyond TV 4 product key and head on over to the upgrade center. Or, if you’d prefer, you can try the plug-in before buying it. The plug-in will cost most users $29.99 — the regular price is $39.99. See the FAQ for more details on pricing.

• More about the DVD Burning Plug-in
• DVD Burning Plug-in FAQ
• Take a screenshot tour (hosted on flickr)
• Watch a video demo of DVD Burning Plug-in (hosted on YouTube)

And last but not least, something for new users

Finally, to mark the launch of Beyond TV 4.5 and the DVD Burning Plug-in, we’ve put our top-selling Beyond TV + Hauppauge PVR-150MCE bundle on sale for $99.99 (normal price is $139.99). With Beyond TV and the PVR-150MCE each normally priced at $69.99, we think this is a good deal… so if you’re reading this and don’t have a PC DVR, you can build one now for less than a $100 (and no subscription fees) and even the shipping is free.

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And as usual, the discussion is over in the SnapStream forums — so try out Beyond TV 4.5 and the DVD Burning Plug-in and let us know what you think!

There’s a new version of Beyond TV coming this Thursday with some of the usual bug fixes and minor improvements… plus one significant new feature.

Watch this space for the announcement.

For now, I’m deliriously happy to announce that we will finally… FINALLY be replacing the little 10 second video that we’ve always shipped with every copy of Beyond TV with the new release. You decide whether the new video is an improvement.

The new video:

The old video:

Since we started SnapStream more than five years ago, our community has been a big part of our company. The community has existed in a bunch of different places:

• our beta program
• our forums
• our company blog
• the digital living room showcase
• Beyond TV Buzz and
• our developer community

And the community has always been a valuable source of product feedback, 3rd party developer plug-ins for Beyond Media and Beyond TV, customer support and a lot more. So we’ve finally gotten around to recognizing the community more prominently on the SnapStream website, through the new community tab:

Clicking on the tab will take you to an table of contents for all the different places the SnapStream community exists.

And on a related note, 3rd party communities that focus on home theater PCs (HTPCs) have played an important role in raising awareness for people building their own PVRs — sites like htpcnews.com, byopvr.com and eHomeUpgrade. We’ve always been very supportive of these sites and we’re glad to see that there’s a new kid on the block: http://www.missingremote.com/. Check out this new site. And as an added bonus, we’re sponsoring a giveaway there right now so when you visit, enter to win a bunch of SnapStream software and hardware.

One of the on-going battles in the PC PVR business is making it as easy as possible for people to get up and running with our product. We’ve seen it time and time again — once people have Beyond TV running, they love it. But getting people to that point is never as easy as we’d like (case in point: the forum that gets the most traffic on forums.snapstream.com is the Beyond TV Support forum). People have to figure out how Beyond TV works with their TV source, then figure out what hardware they need (since most PCs don’t come with a TV tuner card by default… at least, not yet) and then figure out how to set it all up.

Last week, we published a tool on our website which hopefully makes part of this process easier — the Beyond TV Wizard will ask you a series of questions (what country are in? do you want to use Beyond TV on a laptop or a desktop? etc) and then give you a personalized hardware recommendations.

This is a new tool and it’s somewhat experimental — please try it out and give us your feedback.

I’m still surprised at how simple it was to get this done, but Maximum PC went ahead and granted us the rights to put their October 2006 review of Beyond TV 4.3 (which I blogged about last week) here on the SnapStream website. Enjoy!

Read the complete review now >>
(this link will open a new window)

Continuing our drive to make our co-located services more reliable and easier to work on, we tackled the very large problem of the mess of wires and wasted rack space.

The problem:
1. There was nearly 7U of wasted space. (For the normal people out there, a ‘U’ is 1.75″ of vertical space in a rack)
2. Wires were everywhere.

3. We had outgrown our power outlets into the rack and needed more to plug in our servers.
4. Without physically being at the rack, we couldn’t turn on or off a device.

The solution:
1. Remove every last component from the rack and rebuild it from scratch. By doing this, we were able to group our different servers into logical units, as well as put all the dells at the top, making it look cool. Also, we re-mounted our switches in a way that freed up another U.
2. While the rack is apart, properly install and use cable management to clean up the nest of wires.
3 & 4. Install higher amperage power distribution units that have more outlets. As well, we chose two Switched PDUs from APC that have both serial and IP based management. Now, if a device needs to be rebooted, all we have to do is visit a web page.

10pm, The Night of the Swap
What in the world have we gotten ourselves into? Percy, Jason and I arrived at the facility and took a second to look at the task ahead of us. We took all of our external monitoring applications offline for the time being (as to not get paged over and over that the site was down) and then turned off all of the servers in order.

We started by removing each server one at a time and marking all of the important pieces.
It was looking nice.

11PM, Making Progress
Slowly but surely we took each item out.

11:30 PM, Everything Is Out
38U of stuff later and we had a real mess on our hands.

We left the console installed, but finally had everything else out. Not too bad.

Now To Put It Back Together
We started by installing the wiring (network and kvm) and putting in the cable management.

4am, A few Snags Later
At this point, I’m only bleeding a little (dang sharp metal), but we’ve made a lot of progress. We found out why the bottom U was never used (it had a ledge that stuck up) but still managed to use it by moving a non-dell server to that spot.

7am, Pretty much back together
At this point, we had most of the servers back in and wired right. Each box took about 45 minutes to totally wire, notwithstanding the fact that we were tired by this point.

Once the boxes were all in and powered up, we started testing the sites. We did have one casualty. A backend data loading box decided it didn’t want to boot anymore. It couldn’t decide if it was 650mhz or 1ghz and kept hanging. We had to take it in to work on it.

In The End
After it was all said and done, we had a much more manageable space on our hands. We all learned a lot of things on proper rack installation and will draw on that knowledge as we do more work. Since these pictures were taken, we’ve actually put in 3 more servers at the top of the rack. It really fills out the space nicely.

When I first built my HTPC three years ago with a 40GB hard drive, I thought that I was doing pretty good. Analog recordings are a manageable size, and I could always ShowSqueeze them from MPEG2 to WMV each night. I could easily store a couple weeks’ new releases and still hold onto a ten-show deep archive of Seinfeld episodes without ever feeling a pinch.

But last November everything changed when we released Beyond TV 4, and I brought home my first HDTV tuner card. Suddenly, I was measuring show sizes in gigabytes instead of megabytes. My Seinfeld archive was obliterated. I could barely hold onto a week’s worth of content before it would start disappearing. I had a serious case of hard disk envy.

Today, Beyond TV 4.3 delivers more TV to my HTPC. Beyond TV now supports ShowSqueeze for HDTV recordings! I can take massive ATSC transport streams and ShowSqueeze them down to a very manageable DivX or Windows Media format files. Beyond TV 4.3 also strips out the extra sub-channel information so recordings are already up to 50% smaller.

Beyond TV 4.3 is also the first DVR to support DivX 6.1 which incorporates Intel optimizations that can result in up to 300% faster encoding and even smaller file sizes. All of this, along with under-the-hood improvements to fight disk fragmentation, and I can hold onto more high quality TV than ever before.

Of course all this new storage space begs the question… what am I going to record? I’ve already seen every episode of Seinfeld multiple times, so it’s probably time to start branching out. Beyond TV 4.3 also helps with finding new shows to record with our newly launched Beyond TV Buzz (http://www.snapstream.net/buzz.aspx). We’re slowly building a “social DVR experience” into Beyond TV, and Beyond TV Buzz is our first small step towards that. Beyond TV users that opt-in will automatically have their recording data counted in the community statistics. The “Top Recorded Episodes” lists the top 15 episodes recorded in the previous week. You can also expand the list to the top 100 episodes to grab onto the “long tail” of TV. The “Top Upcoming Recordings” is particularly helpful because it provides day-by-day recommendations from the community before the shows actually air. So you never have to feel left out again.

Of course, in addition to delivering more TV than ever before, Beyond TV 4.3 also brings a list of other enhancements and fixes. We’ve added support for the newly released ATI Theater 650 chipset – the first tuner card to combine ATSC/HDTV with hardware encoding for analog TV onto a single chip. We’ve also made SmartSkip for HDTV a whole lot faster. You can check out the full buzz by visiting these links:

Beyond TV 4.3 Release Notes
Beyond TV 4.3 Update for Beyond TV 4 Users
Beyond TV 4.3 Trial for new users
Beyond TV Buzz
Press Release: SnapStream Announces Added Support for DivX 6.1
Press Release: SnapStream Media Launces Beyond TV 4.3

nVidia launched their DualTV MCE card this week. We haven’t seen new tuner products from nVidia in while, so it’s great to see them back in the game.

SnapStream worked closely with nVidia during their development, so Beyond TV 4.2 already has support built right in! Thanks to nVidia, Beyond TV users now have one more choice when choosing dual tuner cards. Go ahead and give it a try and tell us what you think!

Here is the nVidia product page, and Chris Lanier seems to have posted the nVidia press release.

What a night for college hoops! This has been the most excited I’ve been for the NCAA tournament since leaving college. Who picked LSU (without Shaq) to beat Duke? How did UCLA overcome a nine point deficit in three and a half minutes to beat Gonzaga? Oh, and what a three for UT! Go horns!!! (Sorry, I went to UT.)

With all of the great basketball it’s a perfect time to launch a new version of Beyond TV 4. Just in time to setup for this weekend’s games.

Beyond TV 4.2 rolls out today with the ability to schedule recordings across channels. We added this feature in response to customer requests. It’s perfect for giving you even more show coverage when you have conflicts – such as when you’re watching hours and hours of basketball. Basically, it allows you to setup a show to record on any channel that it airs. So that gives Beyond TV even more options to find a show at a different time. So it doesn’t matter that the basketball games are killing all of your prime time recordings!

To make it work, simply schedule a recording from the program guide on the channel that you would prefer to have Beyond TV use (this way, you can give first preference to your HD channels). Then select the same show again. The menu that pops up will give you an option to edit the recording details. From this screen, you can change all of the recording options for the show including SmartSkip settings, ShowSqueeze settings, and the record across channels option. By default, Beyond TV will work as it does today – meaning it will not record across channels unless you set the option.

Also, if you’re having trouble finding new shows to record, check out our new statistics page (login required). This page gives you info about the most popular shows in the BTV community. To login, use your SnapStream.Net login info. If you don’t have a SnapStream.Net account, you can rerun the Setup Wizard to signup. To have your recording votes counted, choose to “Enable advanced features” in the installer or “SnapsStream.NET Settings-> Enable Advanced Featuresâ€? in the Web Admin. I encourage everyone to signup, have your vote counted, help generate more accurate stats, and save other BTV users from bad TV!

Right now, the data includes the show data from our beta testers and also everyone at SnapStream. For a while “Reba” was winning because pbmax had scheduled it on every box in the test lab. It will be interesting to see how these stats change as more people start using the new release and opt in to have their preferences uploaded.

Of course Beyond TV 4.2 also includes a normal slew of improvements and bug fixes. We’ve completely rewritten the guide updater to make it more reliable and improve performance. To see the complete list, check out the release notes.

As always, Beyond TV 4 point upgrades are free to all Beyond TV 4 users. So go grab it and get ready for more basketball action!