SnapStream Blog

Will the ATI HD card allow a single card with HD OTA and analogue standard cable all in one PCI slot?

Let’s start with a little background. High definition tuners that combine both analog and high definition capture come in several flavors.

One approach is to simply have a digital capture card with no analog capture hardware whatsoever. No fuss, no muss. DVICO’s Fusion 5 HDTV Lite is an example of this type of card, and most USB HDTV tuners are also purely digital.

Another approach is known as a dual tuner approach, and basically looks to the operating system like two separate pieces of hardware…one for analog capture and one for digital capture.  Both pieces of hardware can be used simultaneously. This is a good approach if the analog portion does hardware encoding to MPEG-2, but no company is currently implementing cards this way yet.

And finally, there is the hybrid approach.  To the operating system, the capture hardware still appears to be two separate cards, but only one of the cards can be in use at any point in time.  Presumably this saves on the cost of engineering two completely separate paths onto a single card.

Media Center Edition does not support the hybrid approach, basically operating under the assumption that you’re probably most interested in using only the high definition portion of the card anyway. That’s certainly something we understand…after all, mixing a software analog capture model and a digital capture model can be somewhat problematic from a usability standpoint. The ATI HDTV Wonder uses the hybrid approach.

Still, we have, in fact, gone ahead and taken some extra pains to make sure Beyond TV supports both the dual and hybrid tuner approaches. And you’ll just have to believe me when I say it took a lot of work. =) But the end result is that all approaches are fully operational in Beyond TV 4, subject to the limitations of the hardware approaches themselves. Be sure to look at our previous post to see partners that have teamed up with SnapStream to provide a premium HDTV PC experience.

One more note…while we do support hybrid cards, we still strongly recommend that you use a standard hardware encoder side by side with any HD capture card if you want to view or record standard definition content. One thing we’re fond of saying around here is that just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should. Our experience is that offloading all of the capture work to the cards themselves is the best and most consistent way to create a great setup with Beyond TV.

Will the radio feature in BTV 4 support the display of the current song and its artist for the stations that transmit the information?

Definitely a cool feature, isn’t it? The mechanism for transmitting this data is known as RDS (Radio Data System). Unfortunately, this is a feature that must be supported via the operating system and hardware layers before we can add support for it in Beyond TV.  The last time we looked into it, support was in the process of being created by Microsoft, but API’s for accessing this data aren’t quite ready yet. We’ll definitely continue to keep an eye on this as we move forward!

Remember, you can ask us questions by posting to our Q&A forum. We answer a couple of questions each week.
Richard Kuo
Chief Technology Officer

Will there be support for multiple HD tuners in Beyond TV 4?

Absolutely!  We have this running in house and in our homes right now, and it works great.

Some limitations that you should be aware of.  First of all, splitting the HD signal to multiple tuners must be done with care.  It’s very easy to cause the signal to drop out or disappear entirely if done improperly.  Second, as with all multi-tuner situations, keep an eye on the overall performance and responsiveness of your system as the number of tuners increases.

Third and last, BTV4 will support multiple HDTV tuners, but that doesn’t mean the cards themselves will (although many of them do).  Because we want your experience to be as trouble-free as we can possibly make it, we will be posting a list of recommended multi-tuner configurations before the release of BTV4.  If you end up trying alternate configurations, please make sure to do a little web surfing on your purchases to verify the card and drivers you purchase support this feature.

Are there any plans to improve the basic intelligence of the product in the 4.0 release, particularly in the area of conflict handling?

Definitely.  For example, we recently made changes that allow users to adjust the start and end of recordings to work around the infamous CSI-ER overlap issue.  We’ve also licensed and rolled out new HDTV guide services in preparation for HDTV support in Beyond TV 4.  Apparently some companies consider this optional? No, I really don’t understand it either.

Anyway, in BTV4 you will see new HD indicators in the program guide so you can immediately identify what shows will be airing in all of their full high-resolution glory.  We will definitely be continuing to tweak the available types of recordings and available information to catch all of those little side cases that our customers come up with.  Although…don’t forget, adding an extra tuner or two is a very easy and reliable way to save you from worrying about recording conflicts!

Remember, you can ask us questions by posting to our Q&A forum. We answer a couple of questions each week.
Richard Kuo
Chief Technology Officer

When I am watching live TV and hit the record button, will Beyond TV allow me to capture the part of the show that is already in the buffer?

This feature has been requested by a number of our users. While it did take some effort to implement, I am happy to announce that support for this feature, which we refer to as backcapture, will be in Beyond TV 4. So if you’ve ever been watching a show and decided it might be worth saving, then you’ve got something to look forward to with our next release!

When will Beyond TV feature native VFD support such as those in high-end Ahanix HTPC cases?

VFD (vacuum flourescent display) and LCD front panels are a cutting edge new feature on many home theater PC’s that allow the PC to display simple/relevant information on the front of the case. Many consumer electronics devices have these simple readouts on their front panels. Purchasing a case with one of these displays is a popular way to enhance the overall integration of your home theater PC into your entertainment center.

While Beyond TV does not directly support these devices at the present time, several Beyond TV plug-ins have been written to support these output devices with the Beyond TV SDK. LCD Smartie is probably the most well known application for front panel displays that has a Beyond TV plugin.

Remember, you can ask us questions by posting to our Q&A forum. We answer a couple of questions each week.

Richard Kuo
Chief Technology Officer

Does Snapstream have any plans to introduce a “large font” mode into the user interface for the visually impaired?

Just to fill readers in who aren’t familiar with this problem, visibility of fonts on a monitor is a far cry from tweaking visibility for your television. Your monitor is designed to display detailed information at high resolutions. Your television, on the other hand, is designed to display moving images with vivid contrast and brightness. In fact, monitors are so precise compared to televisions that you’ll often hear your average television viewer complain that the video looks worse on a monitor because there is enough detail to expose all the flaws that are present in the video. And not just the video itself…some actors don’t hold up so well under the HDTV microscope either!

But back to reading text. It’s very easy, if you are a programmer that doesn’t know anything about designing software for televisions, to create something that is perfectly readable on your computer and completely unreadable on standard televisions. We’ve unfortunately seen this all too often in other products. We, of course, already design our software for optimal viewing on televisions.

For the visually impaired, there is additional work that needs to done. We’ll confine this discussion to Beyond Media, since the user interfaces will be unified soon under its next generation architecture. While there’s no global setting for modifying font sizes under Beyond Media’s architecture yet, all is not lost. It’s fairly easy to do a global search and replace on the XML files which comprise skins in Beyond Media and adjust the font sizes yourself if you need to do so.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We’ll evaluate adding more direct support for large font modes in future updates.

Are any changes to the EULA and API forthcoming? How about streaming video?

We do have some plans to introduce EULA changes with the 4.0 release. One changes we plan on making is altering the EULA so that Beyond TV SDK web services are free for non-commercial use, whether locally or over the network. However, the EULA will still require a Link license if the information is used to locate or stream media from the server. Commercial use will continue to be covered under the current terms of the license.

As far as actual network hooks for streaming video, the reason we haven’t exposed this to our developer community is because of how tricky networked playback is. Playing videos is a very platform specific problem. Therefore, any support we provided for our streaming protocols would be extremely Windows specific and also specific to how we build our application.

We also plan to modify the EULA to accommodate the use of aggregated data to help deliver better products and services to our customers. Specifically, interesting scenarios such as:

1. Figuring out what parts of the application people use the most
2. Figuring out where users run into the most problems
3. Building in community technologies that allow users to contribute to the Beyond TV experience.

I know that’s a bit vague, but details will be forthcoming. We’re working on some features that you’ll never see on a big corporate mass produced PVR. So if you want to go beyond regular TV, install and run Beyond TV! What a concept!

Remember, you can ask us questions by posting to our Q&A forum. We answer a couple of questions each week.

Richard Kuo
Chief Technology Officer

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