SnapStream Blog

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 Our original (and now slightly outdated) how-to on using Beyond TV and the HDHomeRun can be found here.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

For anyone looking to use Beyond TV to record over-the-air HDTV, Popular Mechanics has an easy-to-read, photo-illustrated guide to setting up your PC.

They miss out on the fact that some PC HDTV tuners are USB-based, like the DVICO FusionHDTV Gold USB, but otherwise the article does a good job. They even use the same HDTV antenna, the silver sensor, that we bundle for free in all of our HDTV tuner kits.

As someone who is always trying to make it easier to understand PC PVR, there are some good queues we (as in SnapStream) can take from this article. Until then, another good resource, even though it’s not quite as simple and user friendly, is the SnapStream HDTV Setup Center.

When blanka and narf collected on the $13,000 bounty to get Windows XP installed on a Mac, we knew it was time to test out the hack. But after two days of failed attempts, we thought our dreams of Windows XP on a Mac were a distant dream. Then Apple released Boot Camp for Intel based Macs.

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