SnapStream Blog

Before I worked for SnapStream, I was actively involved in building plug-ins for Beyond Media. As a former community developer, I’m very happy to announce the opening of a new SnapStream website, http://code.snapstream.com. The site is designed to be a central resource for developers working on Beyond TV and Beyond Media plugins or skins. However, that isn’t the really cool part.

The part that is most exciting is that it is a completely open wiki system.  For those not familiar with a wiki, it is a web site that is editable by the visitors of that site.  The changes are immediately visible, and other users can add, edit, or enhance content as they see fit.  We have left it open for editing by anyone because we believe this is the best way to get the information that developers need as quickly as possible.  This really boils down to the following three things:

1.      If you are creating something and have a question there is a central location to look it up.

2.      If you can’t find the answer then you can leave a note asking for someone to write an article about it.

3.      If you know the answer to a question or if you found something really cool then you can write about it and share it with the community.

To give you a few ideas of items already on the site, there are

• the APIs for Beyond Media and Beyond TV APIs
• the Beyond Media SDK
• an article about the best practices for updating the Beyond Media UI from a background thread and
• documentation for Beyond TV’s third party guide updates.

If you have questions, someone has answers, so go check it out, and happy coding.

About the author: Jason Baumeister has been a Software Engineer for SnapStream Media for a little over six months. Before he started working here, he actively developed multiple plugins with the Beyond Media and Beyond TV SDKs. The extremely popular DVD Library plug-in, for example, is one of his creations.

Hello everyone! This is going to be the first installment of a SnapStream Q&A session that we’ll be running every so often. Our goal here was to establish a way for our customers to engage us directly with some questions and provide some straight up answers to all of our valued customers about anything that you might be curious about. I think it will be a very valuable experience and I hope our readers do too. With that said, let’s get started!

Will SnapStream be integrating Beyond TV and Beyond Media?

The answer to this question is a definite yes!

Here’s how the timeline looks today. Beyond TV 4 is the next product release from SnapStream. It’s a direct upgrade to previous versions of Beyond TV that adds support for high definition recording and playback, as well as FM Radio, DivX support, and a whole lot of spit and polish.

Following the release of Beyond TV 4, we will be porting the ViewScape interface of Beyond TV to the Beyond Media architecture. Beyond Media is built on our next generation and highly extensible media shell foundation, most of which we make available today to developers in the Beyond Media SDK. Porting Beyond TV’s user interface under that architecture will provide a great unified experience for our users.

Only the user interface of Beyond TV needs to be ported to Beyond Media. The server components of Beyond TV will remain the same and will not need to be ported to unify the two applications. In layman’s terms, the guts of Beyond TV that do all of the recording and post processing won’t be changing at all, just the look and the integration. Again, much of this is due to the architecture and excellent server and client side separation in Beyond TV, which developers can access using the Beyond TV SDK…a powerful development platform for customizing and controlling our PVR technology.

What does unifying the two products get you? In addition to a more elegant and seamless experience, you’ll get the ability to plug in new skins and cool additional features (like the DVD Library and Movie Showtimes browser) that have been created by dedicated community members to further enhance your media center experience. Because Beyond Media is based on an Avalon/XAML like model (the presentation technology that Windows Vista is building towards), developers can create all kinds of cool and uniquely home theater like effects in their HTPC applications.

Finally, as we’ve mentioned in our original announcement, if you own Beyond TV 4 and Beyond Media, getting the fully integrated product will be a free upgrade for you when integration is complete. It’s our way of saying thanks to our customers!

What are your plans for high definition support?

We have been testing high definition support for a few months now, and I feel confident in saying we will have excellent support for high definition cards in Beyond TV 4. I won’t mince words…setting up your home entertainment rig for high definition capture can be a small project. But with SIX times the resolution and pure digital clarity, we know many of you are waiting with bated breath for the chance to dive in and explore a whole new world of digital entertainment.

At the beginning of the year I played with many different solutions (probably better classified as hacks) for playing back high definition streams in preparation for bringing this feature to market. The main thing that struck me was how hard and difficult it was to do something simple like capture and play back high definition content. I literally dug through hundreds of posts with many different and lengthy guides that would hack together components and different applications just to accomplish some of what, in my mind, should have been very simple things.

I’m very glad to say that we’ve got the necessary expertise here at SnapStream to do this type of thing RIGHT. We’ve spent thousands of man-hours writing new components from the ground up to handle all of the special requirements for HD support. We’ve also been in the testing process with a group of very dedicated folks who are beating up the product in their own living rooms today and giving us their valuable feedback. That’s why we believe that you will find a much simpler and more elegant approach to high definition support in Beyond TV than you’ve been used to seeing.

One specific question that comes up often is our support for different types of HD. Over the air broadcast cards (antenna) and QAM capture cards (basically, cable HD) are the two types of HD support most people are interested in. Satellite HD is a closed system and one that currently cannot be supported without additional work in the ecosystem.

Our initial release of Beyond TV 4 will support over the air (OTA) capture cards. QAM support is something that we are watching closely and will implement as soon as is feasible.

QAM capture is in a state of flux right now when it comes to the marketplace. As some of our users already have pointed out, it’s an area when some standardization needs to be built into the OS before general support can be introduced. In general, we watch for some standardization because this market is moving very quickly and our efforts are best spent working on lasting solutions for our customers.

However, there is a balance between how easy the support is to implement and how proprietary it is. Our plan right now is to deliver solid OTA high definition first. Here’s why.

• 1. Having solid over-the-air high definition support is required before we can extend support to QAM. The software infrastructure required is similar, so refining over-the-air support in the product drives both features forward.
• 2. It would be silly for us to hold back over-the-air support from those customers that can use it today.

Once Beyond TV 4 is released, we’ll be taking a good hard look at QAM to see if we can create a solution that makes sense for our customers. Please continue to give us constructive feedback on this issue!

I’d like to thank all of our customers again for giving us the opportunity to answer some of the questions that have been on your minds. We got far more questions than we could actually answer in this first installment… but we will continue to do this Q&A on a regular basis and get to more questions! You can ask us new questions by posting to our new Q&A forum.

Richard Kuo
Chief Technology Officer