Beyond TV 3.5 - Adding Multi-Tuner Support, a Quick Beta Look
by Andrew Ku on August 24, 2004 12:33 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Beyond TV 3.5 - Major Changes: The Minor Stuff
SnapStream is considering the home video collection more and more. If you think about it, most users are more than likely to have a lot of recorded content after a few months of use. Sorting through the list to find that specific video isn't supposed to be hard, considering that all you had to do to find specific recorded VHS tapes was probably just to look next to your TV. Beyond TV tries to provide some relief to those with a reasonable sized library by instituting a sorting system and a "space left meter". This meter is simply a way of helping you manage your library, since you are more likely to delete files when you know you are low on storage space (which you can allocate in the web admin). Click to enlarge. |
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Note how you can enter an entry (in our case, in the "by folder" sort), and see the shows of that particular series.
There are also more options in the setup recordings menu. Note the "Search by Keyword" and "Setup a Manual Recording" options. Search by keyword allows you to search most data available for a particular show in the EPG, which, in SnapStream's case, would be: show name, episode name, description, and actors/actresses. While Zap2It.com provides other information such as the director, SnapStream doesn't utilize some of that data.
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Keywords are not treated in a search engine in a similar manner. If you search for "Chandler Monica", the shows with data that actually contain "Chandler Monica" in that order will appear. There are no Boolean operators available.
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However, note the difference when we switch to Search by Title. Instead of providing the same program information as the keyword based search, the information provided is much more limited and BTV 3.5 beta only shows the upcoming episode for that show. This might just be a beta thing, but we want to see the same detailed information shown at least for the episode's program information details.
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As we mentioned before, there is more information provided by the EPG service, but SnapStream doesn't use it. And while Beyond TV 3 will show the original air date of the episode being watched in the lower left hand corer of the information panel (when you watch TV), it is not displayed in the program details.
We should also mention that the only way to see program details now is to "Search by Keyword". We would like to see Beyond TV provide the option as an entry right off the Program Guide. Searching by Title no longer will display the show's episodes once you click on the show name; instead, it will display the details of the upcoming episode for that title after you pick it from the search list.
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In our previous review, we complained that the ability to set recordings manually is an option that should be provided to the user, and Beyond TV incorporates in this version.
Beyond TV 3.5 – Major Changes: Where did the Menu Go?
Beyond TV 3.5 – Major Changes: The Minor Stuff (cont.)
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Filibuster - Wednesday, August 25, 2004 - link
In a PVR250 card you cannot turn off the hardware compression...the card basically does all output through the mpeg encoder.With TV Link (network client) you can watch hardware encoded mpeg (live or recorded) via a lan, but not over the internet. It works much better than the web based streamer too.
Unfortunatly that takes out one thing important to some people. :)
AndrewKu - Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - link
#5 - It was suppose to be within a week. But it looks like SnapStream has bumped the date to early Sept.Btw, a slight clarification, when I mentioned that conflict management is not on the client side that was relating to the time/clock issue between the server and the client. When you schedule a recording that creates a conflict, you still need to perform conflict management, even on the client side.
ViRGE - Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - link
There are 2 reasons(I know of) why they can't really stream the MPEG2 stream; it's bandwidth intensive(up to 12Mb/sec), and it requires a decoder license. Even transcoding the stream isn't very feesable, since it would require decoding the MPEG2 stream, then encoding in WMV, which may be difficult to do in real time. A seperate program is also required, and likely a specialized decoder, since by default, I don't believe that WMP knows how to deal with a streaming MPEG2 file anyhow, which may also be a problem with the codec.glennpratt - Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - link
Also, they don't have to use the Hardware Encoding features of the card, you should be able to turn it off.I don't know why they can't stream hardware MPEG2 encoding... I guess that would be a completely different way to streaming as opposed to the software encoder. MCE requires hardware encoding and you can just start playing another program on another MCE or PC while it's recording. Not exactly streaming...
Night201 - Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - link
Any idea of a timeframe of when this is coming out? Sept? Oct?johnsonx - Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - link
In a multi-tuner setup, I'm guessing you have to use the same encoding method for both cards; the hardware cards only do MPEG-2, and MPEG-2 is the one you can't stream.That's just my guess; I'm not at all sure.
Resh - Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - link
I really wish they could find a way to allow streaming over networks if at least one of the tuner cards is a software encoder. For example, one could have a PVR-250 and an ATI TV-Wonder, with the latter being used to stream over the network.No idea why they haven't done this, but if it is a technical possibility, I wish they would do it.
Another nicety would be the ability to add program info to edited files (e.g., after removing commercials, we could add the air date, channel, and synopsis).
Can't wait for the list be folders option.
reboos - Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - link
MythTV!Rapacious - Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - link