SnapStream Blog

We want to remind you that on June 12, 2009 all full-power broadcast television stations in the United States will no longer be broadcasting on analog airwaves and will begin broadcasting only in digital. (More info at www.dtv.gov)

With that said, if you are currently using an analog antenna you have a couple of alternatives to keep your Beyond TV working.

1) Continue using your antenna to record, but you will now be recording over-the-air digital TV. You will need a digital converter box and an USB-Uirt IR Blaster in order to use your existing analog tuner. (Here’s a step-by-step article on setting up a digital converter box with Beyond TV.)

2) Switch from using an antenna to something like cable or satellite in Beyond TV. (Additional accessories may be required depending on the service you purchase.)

3) Purchase and install an HD TV tuner card.

If you have any questions please visit the SnapStream forum thread, Beyond TV and the Digital Transition.

Since our last Beyond TV release we’ve been working diligently on two major new features: Clear QAM support and place-shifting! And after spending many long Friday nights in the office preparing beta releases and sifting through bug reports early Monday morning we are ready to release Beyond TV 4.9.

Clear QAM Support: With version 4.9, Beyond TV adds Clear QAM support. This means that all of you cable users out there can now record any channels that are transmitted in unencrypted QAM in their native digital format. Most cable providers transmit the local networks in unencrypted QAM, at a minimum, and there are often more channels on top of that like ESPN HD, Discovery HD.

Before this, the only way to record TV shows in Beyond TV in their native digital and possibly HD format was using an over-the-air antenna and clear QAM now adds a way to record more channels digitally. Using clear QAM in Beyond TV requires you to use one of the clear QAM cards that we support. Briefly, we support most of the Hauppauge devices that support clear QAM, including the Hauppauge HVR-1600, the Hauppauge HVR-1800, the Hauppauge HVR-1950 and the Hauppauge HVR-950Q. And on top of that we support some ATI TV tuners, the HDHomeRun, and some Avermedia TV tuners.

Placeshifting: We have incorporated a video player in the web admin, allowing you to access and watch all your TV recordings via the web interface! This new feature adds unlimited possibilities to where and when you watch your TV recordings, whether it be in a hotel room while away on business, or just on a different computer in your home. Here’s a screenshot of placeshifting in action:

iPhone/iPod Touch 2.0 Firmware Bug Fixed: When Apple released version 2.0 of their iPhone and iPod Touch firmware, it introduced an audio/video sync issue for SnapStream recordings. The issue is fixed now in Beyond TV 4.9, thanks in part to our H.264 codec vendor MainConcept.

Beyond TV 4.9 also adds beta support for the Hauppauge HD-PVR (read the note at the bottom of this page for the caveats on using the Hauppauge HD PVR with Beyond TV).

And for an entire list of new features and bug fixes check out the release notes.

Along with these new features and updates we have decided to make what used to be the DVD Burning & H.264 “plug-in” a standard part of Beyond TV. So the price of Beyond TV, for any new purchases, is now $99 (Beyond TV was $69.99 and the plug-in used to be $29.99).

And if you already own Beyond TV and never purchased the DVD burning and H.264 plug-in, that’s fine — you can still upgrade to Beyond TV 4.9 without the plug-in. And you can still add the plug-in at any point in the future using the upgrade store.

So download Beyond TV 4.9, whether you’re an existing user upgrading or a new user looking to try it out!

Updated (11/22/2008, 12:28pm): clarified the combination of Beyond TV and the plug-in and elaborated on the new features in this version.
Updated (12/8/2008, 11am): added link to “footnotes” about the HD PVR and highlighted the iPhone/iPod Touch 2.0 firmware fix in Beyond TV 4.9.

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)

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.

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.)

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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Last week, we released two new skus in the SnapStream Store that include Silicon Dust’s HDHomeRun network TV tuner card— the HDHomeRun stand-alone, and the HDHomeRun bundled with Beyond TV.

With the HDHomeRun network tuner and a cable TV connection (no set-top box required) you can record free unencrypted (clear) QAM HDTV in Beyond TV. The digital signal comes through a standard coax cable feed, originating from your cable company. Most cable providers today will at least push a standard and hi-def version of the major networks (e.g. ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) as clear QAM channels.

Note: in order to use the HDHomeRun you need to subscribe to regular cable (e.g. Time Warner or Comcast) and, because the HDHomeRun works over a network connection, you must have a wired (at least 100 Mbps recommended) home network.

Read more about setting up the HDHomeRun with Beyond TV in this how-to blog article.

INTRODUCTION

Last month, we quietly released a version of Beyond TV (4.6.1) that supports Silicon Dust’s HDHomerun Digital QAM dual tuning device. What does this mean to you?? If you are up to a little setup, it means you no longer have to rely on an over-the-air ATSC signal—instead, you are able to directly tune non-encrypted (Clear) QAM channels from over your coax cable. No more unpredictable thunderstorms interfering with your recording of LOST or Heroes!

Shortly after we released version 4.6.1, I became intrigued with the idea of setting up the HDHomerun with my Beyond TV box at home. My motivation stemmed mostly from times when I came home to find that my HD recordings would cut off halfway through a show or were garbled at points during playback. As many existing over-the-air users may be able to attest to, dropping and unreliability of over-the-air signals can be a bit annoying. My other contributing motivation was to see if I could set it up myself—a non-technical person who works in sales/marketing for SnapStream.

Note: Over-the-air HD or Clear QAM tuning devices can be added on to Beyond TV at any time. Because of the complexity of setting up Clear QAM, I would recommend to users that you start out by setting up Beyond TV with analog or digital cable before trying to set it up with Clear QAM.

So I was ready to get rolling on the setup of the HDHomerun! My enthusiasm could hardly be contained—then I looked at a tutorial on how to set the HDHomerun up with Beyond TV. I was deflated at the thought of going through the several pages of required setup—could it really be this complicated to set up? I was determined to get an answer to my question, so I proceeded.

WHAT IS CLEAR QAM?

Before we get started– a little information on what QAM actually is. In layman’s terms, QAM is digital cable without a set-top-box. More specifically, Clear QAM is unencrypted digital cable without a set-top-box.

In more technical terms, Clear QAM can be described as an unencrypted video signal that is sent through standard coax cable from cable providers in a digital format. Most cable providers today will at least push a standard and hi-def version of the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) through their coax lines to customers. I say at least because oftentimes, additional Clear QAM channels are made available by the cable companies. Though Clear QAM is not quite cable card support, it is a step in the right direction.

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This review is the fifth in a series of product reviews written by the SnapStream community members. This review is of the Crossbar Media MediaCaster written by Dave, aurigus0 in the forums.

Here is the problem: you have a DVR/HTPC hooked up to your TV downstairs, but you have other televisions in your house you wish to use to access the HTPC. How do you distribute the Audio/Video signal to these other television sets?

One solution to this problem is using the Crossbar MediaCaster, which was kindly provided to me for review by SnapStream Media.

The basic idea of this hardware is that you are creating a “private access channel” AKA Avcast® entertainment network, which is provided content from any device that outputs an RCA signal.

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Late last week, began shipping a small update to Beyond TV… version 4.6.1. Here’s what’s new, from the release notes:

Bug Fixes

– Recordings failing due to, “Could not attach to graph” error are no longer failing.
– Setup wizard now detects sound devices for software encode TV tuner cards.
– TV format settings now correctly being saved as NTSC or PAL in the Web Admin.
– AVerMedia M780 PCI express TV tuner now capable of using both of its onboard tuners simultaneously.
– Serial tuning satellite and set-top-boxes on COM ports higher than 9 can now be done.
– Meta-data no longer lost when copying video files.
– Manual recordings no longer being ended prematurely when the Beyond TV recording scheduler is rebuilt.
– Manual recordings made within the Beyond TV GUI are now being scheduled on the correct channel in cases where duplicate channels exist in a person’s lineup.

Improvements

– Library monitoring and performance improved.
– HDHomeRun (ATSC and QAM support) now supported.
– Serial tuning for DirecTV D11 Model 500 now supported.

The most significant feature in this release is support for unencrypted QAM… What is unencrypted QAM and what does it mean that Beyond TV supports it now?

I’ll elaborate in another blog posting, but in short, it means you can watch and record some of the channels on your cable connection in their pure digital form and, depending on the channel and programming, in high-definition as well. Getting this working does require some specific hardware and to get everything setup, but if this survey is any indication, this won’t deter many of you. Enjoy!

Existing Beyond TV 4 users: Get your free update to Beyond TV 4.6.1

For everyone else, download the free 21-day trial

(and if you’ve tried Beyond TV or the DVD Burning Plug-in before, you’ll get a new 21-day trial period with Beyond TV 4.6.1)