SnapStream Blog

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.
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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?

You know how sometimes you work really extra hard think no one noticed….. Well the development and business sides of SnapStream worked their collective butts off getting the Beyond TV 4.7 release out the door (passersby wondered, “where did their butts go”). Then a week or so passed and we were informed that we’d each get a new iPhone or iPod Touch to go along with the H.264 plugin we made for Beyond TV. The last of the devices just got here in the mail and we took a group picture to show our smiling faces and shiny new toys.

SnapStreamers Squinting in the Sun

If you’ve read the other articles in the More Power To Us series, you know that the SnapStream co-location facility has a good amount of drive space.

Sometimes, however, it’s not size that matters. In this case, we’re upgrading our backend DB server with some faster (and slightly larger) disks.

For your viewing pleasure….

A case of 15,000 RPM 36gb SCSI U320 Disks

Best part about it, the entire box cost around $600 (including buying a number of spares. Since we really don’t need a huge about of raw space, we could go back a generation or two in terms of size and still get the speed we need. I’ll get a number on transfer rates when we install it, but I expect it to be between ridiculous and ludicrous.

Call me cheap, but I tend to use Beyond TV to save money… like by ditching cable tv or by recompressing shows to my iPhone instead of buying them on the iTunes store .

So here we go again, this time I take on the “boxed set dvd” release of a tv show that just aired.
There are two main problems with boxed sets as I see it.

1. They are expensive.
2. They aren’t guaranteed to be release at any specific time (or at all)

Hand made DVD sets from last season

The start of the Fall TV Season is a great time to start building a collection of your favorite shows. Or maybe you don’t know what your favorites will be, so just record everything.
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This one goes out to all the iPhone users out there.

I took a headfirst dive into the world of Apple on iPhone release day. I waxed poetically about the browser to anyone that would listen, dreamed of pinching my way through maps and marveled at the bright hi-res screen. The prospect of watching a video where squinting wasn’t required had particular appeal.

Then my utopia was shattered. How in the world would I get my TV shows on it? Pay $35 a series on the iTunes store? I think not.
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It’s here! We’ve been working hard improving the features and eliminating the bugs in our latest version of our Beyond TV software. The key features in Beyond TV 4.7 include the following:

Automatically Sync Recordings to iPod and iPhone (Optional Plug-In) - This is an innovative feature that uses the H.264 format to re-compress your Beyond TV recordings and sync them to your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV. Using an iTunes podcast rss feed you can now automatically sync your television recordings to your iPod or iPhone. With the recent split between NBC and iTunes (see previous post) this feature will serve as a new outlet to get your recordings on to your iPhone or iPod without a hitch.

Drive Pooling - If you are worried about running out of space for your recordings this feature will calm your fears. Beyond TV 4.7 lets you treat a group of hard drives as one recording folder. It will automatically manage and distribute the content you have recorded. So go out and grab a 1TB external hard drive ($335 @ newegg.com), plug into your home theater PC and instantly expand how many TV shows you can record!

Firefly Mobile - Now you can use your Smartphone, iPhone, or other web device as a remote control for your Beyond TV.

Firefly Mobile: Control Beyond TV using your Smartphone

Community Recordings - When enabled, this feature will automatically record the top shows each day as reported by Beyond TV Buzz. ( An extra on our TV listing website, couchville.com, is Beyond TV Buzz; it posts the top recorded episodes of our BTV users.)

Beyond TV Link DVD Burning (Optional Plug-In) - Just like you can burn DVDs on your Beyond TV Server you can now do the same using Beyond TV Link.

We’ve also improved some of the existing features in Beyond TV 4.7:

• H.264 playback is included in all copies of Beyond TV 4.7
• Extend the recording time while a job is currently being recorded by simply hitting the record button and adding the amount of time needed (up to 3 hours). So, if the football game goes into overtime, you can just lengthen the recording time and you won’t miss a thing.
• We’ve improved the Record This Timeslot Recording option by adding Record Only on This Day as an option
• Recover recordings that might have been interrupted due to a power outage, machine reboot, etc.
• An Internet Explorer user? Now you can download files greater than 2GB in size without breaks.
• We now have support for multiple USB-UIRT devices.
• Beyond TV Link can now stream live TV for multiple days on end without stopping.

So, here’s to crossing the finish line! Beyond TV 4.7 is new and better than ever. If you have already purchased the DVD Burning plug-in you get the new plug-in, with H.264 support for free! Just upgrade to Beyond TV 4.7 to get the new version of the plug-in. For a complete detailed list of features, improvements, and bugs we worked through take a look at the release notes.

New Users Try the new Beyond TV 4.7

Existing Users Get your free upgrade to Beyond TV 4.7 (and it includes a trial of the new DVD burning and H.264 plug-in)

Also, check-out more screenshots of Beyond TV 4.7 (hosted at flickr.com)

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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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.