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Latest SnapStream PVR App Reviewed
martensitic writes "Yahoo! posted this positive AP review of the newest version of a third-party PC app designed to compete with TiVo and Microsoft's Media Center. SnapStream 's 'Beyond TV 3' (sounds like something Fox would produce) allows streaming to standard web browsers for watching on other computers in your home, and promotes automatic commercial break recognition that has been downplayed in other products. (Previously mentioned here.)"
1. As long as the PC was a cable connection coming into it, it can record, it requires no TV. If you wanted to, you could put the PC, lets say in the basement, and run cables for video, and one for the IR remote (most IR remotes use common 1/8th audio jacks, so you could get an extension cord rather easily).
2. BTV3 CAN be run as a service. It can also be run in a window, or fullscreen, and can be configured to open on startup as such.
It's pretty similar to All In Wonder's EAZYLOOK stuff. It has a few more home user type features like commercial skipping, but I found it a bit harder to configure in different ways. ATI's software also lets you use things like MultiView.
I really enjoy my Beyond TV version 3 setup:
:)
WinPVR card, 200 GB hard drive, a DVD burner, and Beyond TV.
It saves the shows in a standard file format, and I can use other software to convert to a more compressed format and archive to DVD.
At one point, I had problems with it frequently crashing, but downloading the newest update solved that problem.
I still use my TiVo, but I am slowly switching my TV viewing to the Beyond TV system.
Do you know what .net is? Why are you afraid of it? It's part of WindowsUpdate, perhaps you'd feel more comfortable getting the framework from that site. Think of it as the newer VB runtimes.
Linux: Free if your time is worthless.
It is a damn shame, but this is not the Tivo you are looking for.
Think of it as the newer VB runtimes.
.Net, most of which have
no basis in reality.
Mod parent up. Seriously.
People seem to have all these spooked-out misconceptions about
As the parent (basically) said, you can consider it just a new API for windows, comparable to the VB runtimes or, more accurately, an extention to the idea of "Win32", which includes (as the name would suggest, thought not entirely based on) quite a lot more inbuilt support for network-oriented tasks.
In addition, files that have been compressed into divx or some other supported compression screen can be viewed from any pc via a web interface. Yes, you could share the folders out.
/cron/ recorded files to be automatically compressed over night. There are many options for quality of encode as well.
The divx compression is nice, as you can
I've been using snapstream trial for a few weeks now. If I manage to get my ide transfer rates up on this godforsaken nforce board I can start working with mythtv.
So, yes due to a lock in currently, I've been happy with snapstream.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Why the hell are people not supporting digital TV? It's a veritable goldmine!
The first company to produce decent software that works with all current digital TV cards, even if it's only the dvb-t standard used in Australia, will make a fucking mint.
At the moment people are waiting with baited breath for some decent windows software to come out, and are willing to pay money for it. So why the fuck isn't anybody writing the software?
I'd happily buy this if it supported digital TV, but like most of the other crap on the market, it only works in the US, and only for analogue TV. Somebody please, if you're out there, write some decent software for Australian digital TV tuners!
EGG, the Electronic Gamers Guild
I've been using the Beyond TV 3 trial version for a week now, it works well and I really like the web interface.
However although it advertises that it can also 'stream live tv' this functionality doesn't work with some very popular PVR cards (the WinTV 250/350 series) that do mpeg2 encoding in hardware.
This functionality is promised for a future version, but its something to consider if you own one of these cards.
there's at least one person on the BTV forums that is using a p2-400 or p2-450 in conjunction with a Hauppauge PVR-250 hardware mpeg2 encoder card for recording with. Naturally a faster PC will chew through some of the optional work a lot quicker, but a fairly old machine can still do fine if you have a hardware encoder card. I bought this software because it was the only one with Canadian TV listings, but came to find out it has a wealth of cool features. I love it. I personally have an XP 1700+ in mine, and it takes about 40 minutes to scan a one hour episode for commercial breaks, or SmartChapters as it calls them. And IIRC it takes about 45 minutes to convert the 8Mbps mpeg2 data to 1GB/hour divx. The next version will sport multiple tuner support, so you can record two things at once or watch a live broadcast while recording something else. That'll be nice, I'll be buying a second, if not a third, PVR-250 just to make it a little nicer to use. When v3.5 comes I doubt the thing will ever not be in BTV mode.
I'll pass, having installed their previous efforts.
;-)
And besides, my (here we go again) MythTV box does the same... and also lets me:
- Play my giant MP3/Ogg collection
- Have a slideshow of all the digital photos I've ever taken.
- watch DVD's and rip them if they're any good.
- play about 40G of movies on command,and share them on my local network.
- Have a nice auto-updating weather display, with forecasts and satellite photos.
- Read a bunch of RSS newsfeeds
All of which is accessible from my remote.... and free, if your time is worth nothing
Seriously, first person who makes a 'standard' mythTV box for under a grand (AUD) will make a killing.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Thought I should chime in, here. I used to use Snapstream for capturing shows I wanted to watch. Eventually I replaced it with a Replay. No regrets really, but it was a different animal.
"1) Does your PC have to be in the same room as your TV."
Only if you want to watch on the TV. Watching on the computer was fine for me, though. I went on several business trips, each time I had a bunch of shows queued up ready to watch.
"2) Does your PC have to have somebody logged in? In other words can it run as a service under W2K."
Actually I don't remember. I think it does run as a service, but I wouldn't swear on my soul over it. I had a dedicated machine for it. It's not something you want running while you have a game or something playing. (Maybe if I had a dual proc machine for it...)
Frankly, I think there is room for both a TiVo and a Snapstream (or similar) system. The TiVo is great for catching those shows you definitely want to watch within a few days of capturing it. The Snapstream system, though, was much better for archival of shows. I don't expect many would find that all that interesting, but boy I sure did. When I first got the itch to try it, I found out that Quantum Leap was on at 4pm. DOH! I'm at the office at 4! A couple of weeks after I found that out, I noticed that the reruns would be starting over again from season 1. SWEET. So I set up the machine to record at a respectable data rate, then just let it record. When time permitted, I started watching the episodes in order from the beginning. Could I do that with the Replay? Eh maybe. The thing is, though, I don't have a whole heck of a lot of control over how small the files end up being. With the Snapstream, though, I had it doing roughly 300kbits a second at 320 by 240. A little blocky? Sure. A little blurry? Sure. Worse than VHS? Yeah somewhat. You'd be surprised how quick you get used to it, though, especially when the story's so engaging. I could fit approximately four eps per CD. I had a large hard drive so that wasn't an issue. Before long, I had something like 12 gigs of ALMOST every single episode of Quantum Leap. (Got a hell of a lot of MST3K and Enterprise for a while, too..)
The machine was Win2k. Make all the jokes you like about the stability of Windows, but that thing stayed up an average of 3 months, capturing video all the time. Eventually, though, the sound-driver gave up, and I'd have to reboot the machine. Oh well. Linux it is not, but it was more than acceptable, and I had to do very little fiddling to make everything work.
I wish I still had it today. Unfortunately, I just haven't had time to tinker with it. It'll probably be resurrected before too long, though. I'm finding more and more shows I'd like to watch.
Sorry for rambling here. Just brought up some fond memories here. I hope I can figure out how to get a PC talking to the Digital Cable box so I can enjoy the broader content.
"Derp de derp."
yeah, and spend 16 hours just to get fucking XMLtv working right. MYthTV is only designed for uberLinux geeks, its the Holy Grail of impossible installations. Even with KnoppMyth I couldn't get it working...
BTV is PVS actually, v3.4 brought the name change to BeyondTV. After the recording finishes it scans the audio and video looking for coinciding silence and black screens. It works pretty well for me, depends on your signal quality I would imagine. Some report it doesn't work very well for them at all. I've no complaints.
If you are using anything but a hardware mpeg encoder you may not be too happy with its performance. The software mpeg encoder they used isn't that great. The output looks much worse than captures done with, say, virtualdub. Doesn't look like it even comes from the same card. But if you don't mind spending a few bucks (I hear they've been on sale a lot lately for $99US) on a Hauppauge PVR-250 hardware mpeg encoder card I think you'll be very happy with BTV. The encoder it has is definitely its weak point.
For those of us who use our desktops as a PVR instead of dedicating a machine to it, I highly recommend a TvTime and vcr combination under Linux. MythTV is a overkill for my needs. TvTime is hands down the best tv viewing program, IMO, and there are web frontends for vcr to make scheduling recordings as snap. There are some features lacking in this setup that a normal PVR system would have, such as live rewind and such, but I think there's alot of people going through way more trouble than they need to because they don't know there's any other way..
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
MythTV used to be a major b*tch to setup, I remember compiling the tarballs, pulling in all of the dependencies by hand, etc. It was quite painful (this was back around 0.9, when I started using it).
However, now that Jarod has put up his excellent website on setting up MythTV with Fedora Core 1, and Axel builds RPMs, it's a no-brainer. And, at least for me in the United States (California), XMLTV hasn't broken in months. And, thanks to the crack programmers, there's an option to check on the status of the last XMLTV grab (and MythTV e-mails you also).
Now of course, if your hardware deviates from the website, then you might have a problem. But, for the most part, it's still pretty easy.
-- Joe
As Issac, the Mythtv maitainer, has stated many times, he has little interest in ruining companies, or indeed increasing mythTV use. He's interested in developing it for his own use, and if other people have useful stuff to add then all the better.
Mythtv is better, but it is also very hard to use, and there is a very good reason for that, it is still in development. Isaac and the rest of the mythtv guys are interested in people using it and providing useful feedback and bug reports, but they have very little interest in people being unable to figure it out and then saying "This software needs to be easier to use."
There is however work being done on windows frontends, however the backend will never be ported, as there is no point, and it would involve a complete rewrite.
Considering that what it does is record the shows to an MPEG or WMV file, the answer here would be yes. Even better, it can use third-party capture/encoding cards (WinTV-PVR), so it doesn't even touch the program stream (although it can use software encoding too).
If you record in MPEG2, you can use something like TMPEG to drop it onto a DVD without re-encoding.
What's funny is that the review didn't mention the coolest feature, which is the remote scheduling through snapstream.net. It's just a regular TV listings page, and a free account comes with the software. You can click to record a show, and the PVR checks in every ten minutes or so for additions, and adds them to the schedule. It's just an outbound HTTP connection, so it works through a firewall without exposing anything.
The net result is that if I'm away from home and hear about a show I want to record, I can set it up it in seconds from any web browser on the 'net. Try that with your Tivo.
This was a fairly shaky product in early versions, but it's really developed into something useful. I'd never go back to a VCR.
As a PAID customer of the 3.x series, I am impatiently waiting for fixes that will resolve the application crashing on some systems.
If you are thinking about buying, take the time to read the user forums on snapstream.com.
The end user helping end user support has been considerably better than the official answers in some cases.
I wanted the new features of 3.4.
I ended up reverting to 3.3 to have the system work. 3.3 runs with no problems. Love the program.
My concern is that currently a released version (3.4) filled with problems and the company's answer is "want to try the beta of 3.5?"
No, I do NOT want to try a beta on my dedicated video server to resolve the problems in your RELEASED application.
-------------
That all being said:
Athlon 1.4
1 GB RAM
Windows XP SP1
Nvidia FX 5200
ATI TV Wonder
200 gb of storage
Snapstream 3.3
The ATI does the capturing with the NVidia handling the TV/Out. The output is run into a modulator that allows me to feed the media server into any tv connected to the antenna wire on channel 4. I have ripped all of our DVDs to xvids, so the kids no longer get an opportunity to scratch them up. Drop them into one of the directories that Snapstream knows about, and they are available for the kids to watch on demand.
I really like the ability to set up recordings from the road. Using the web interface and coming back into the system from a remote location lets me check recordings, setup new recordings, and even download/watch recordings.
During the Womans World Cup last fall, my daughter and I were in DC for 6 games. We took a side trip to Philly for 2 games. At the time I was playing with the 3.1 or 3.2 trial version. We would hit a wifi hotspot in the evenings, eat some dinner while we downloaded games that we had recording from other venues.
System will also allow you to watch a live stream through the web interface. My father who is overseas, occasionally wants to watch sporting events or other shows. He comes in, sets up an event, and watches.
I'm not regretting buying the application. The version I thought I was buying didnt work as promised. The previous version DOES run as promised, so it is functioning quite well for me.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
ATI's software is only compatible with ATI hardware -- You can't use the Media Center and Eazylook without an All-in-Wonder or a TV wonder card.
And the AIW doesn't have hardware MPEG encoding. I presume you could use SnapStream with an All-in-Wonder card, but the hardware requirements for the PC would be much higher since it'd be using software encoding.
If if I were going to set up an HTPC with SnapStream, I'd probably get a Hauppauge PVR card for video capture and get a cheap 8MB AGP card for VGA.
I just installed Beyond TV 3 on my Windows XP machine last night after reading the /. review. At first the app seemed pretty cool, easy to install (except for having to install the .NET Framework). It automatically found my cheap-o $40 dollar capture card and scanned all the channels. One thing I did really like was the channel guide, and how easy it is (or appears to be) to record any program of your choice. Thats when the problems started happening. Right when I tried to record a TV show, the program crashed on me. So I try to reload, crashes twice. So I reboot, and it keeps on crashing before or when it gets to the main screen. So that was my experience with Beyond TV 3. Maybe I will try it again, maybe wait for a new version, I don't know. I just didn't feel like troubleshooting/reinstalling it all night when I feel it should work fine on its own.
"you're saying that the PVR-250 I buy today will still outperform any software decoder I run on it??" Actually, yes. Hell, once we get those 3 billion gigaflops chips, we'll REALLY be able to do 3D gaming like no tomorrow! Notice how Tivo also has entirely hardware chip based encoding and decoding? Sometimes the most efficient way of doing something is just having a dedicated piece of hardware who's sole purpose is that task By your mentality nobody would have 3d graphics accelerators either. The biggest problem here is not mpeg encoding, but _realtime_ mpeg encoding. If you hang around the PVR boards long enough, you'll see that everyone's always using their old spare machine as their PVR, not their new 8ghz 64-bit processor machine like you're mentioning. Using a PVR-250 etc makes otherwise feeble machines into a tv recording powerhouse. I still can't believe that people gripe and complain so much over a part that you can get on ebay for 70 bucks, and that gives stellar and reliable performance no matter what application drives it. No matter how much CPU power I've got, I want it doing my primary tasks; not being whittled away at doing background stuff like recording tv.