Beyond TV 4.3 Delivers More TV!
June 8th, 2006 at 3:19 pm by Soham
When I first built my HTPC three years ago with a 40GB hard drive, I thought that I was doing pretty good. Analog recordings are a manageable size, and I could always ShowSqueeze them from MPEG2 to WMV each night. I could easily store a couple weeks’ new releases and still hold onto a ten-show deep archive of Seinfeld episodes without ever feeling a pinch.
But last November everything changed when we released Beyond TV 4, and I brought home my first HDTV tuner card. Suddenly, I was measuring show sizes in gigabytes instead of megabytes. My Seinfeld archive was obliterated. I could barely hold onto a week’s worth of content before it would start disappearing. I had a serious case of hard disk envy.
Today, Beyond TV 4.3 delivers more TV to my HTPC. Beyond TV now supports ShowSqueeze for HDTV recordings! I can take massive ATSC transport streams and ShowSqueeze them down to a very manageable DivX or Windows Media format files. Beyond TV 4.3 also strips out the extra sub-channel information so recordings are already up to 50% smaller.
Beyond TV 4.3 is also the first DVR to support DivX 6.1 which incorporates Intel optimizations that can result in up to 300% faster encoding and even smaller file sizes. All of this, along with under-the-hood improvements to fight disk fragmentation, and I can hold onto more high quality TV than ever before.
Of course all this new storage space begs the question… what am I going to record? I’ve already seen every episode of Seinfeld multiple times, so it’s probably time to start branching out. Beyond TV 4.3 also helps with finding new shows to record with our newly launched Beyond TV Buzz (http://www.snapstream.net/buzz.aspx). We’re slowly building a “social DVR experience” into Beyond TV, and Beyond TV Buzz is our first small step towards that. Beyond TV users that opt-in will automatically have their recording data counted in the community statistics. The “Top Recorded Episodes” lists the top 15 episodes recorded in the previous week. You can also expand the list to the top 100 episodes to grab onto the “long tail” of TV. The “Top Upcoming Recordings” is particularly helpful because it provides day-by-day recommendations from the community before the shows actually air. So you never have to feel left out again.
Of course, in addition to delivering more TV than ever before, Beyond TV 4.3 also brings a list of other enhancements and fixes. We’ve added support for the newly released ATI Theater 650 chipset – the first tuner card to combine ATSC/HDTV with hardware encoding for analog TV onto a single chip. We’ve also made SmartSkip for HDTV a whole lot faster. You can check out the full buzz by visiting these links:
Beyond TV 4.3 Release Notes
Beyond TV 4.3 Update for Beyond TV 4 Users
Beyond TV 4.3 Trial for new users
Beyond TV Buzz
Press Release: SnapStream Announces Added Support for DivX 6.1
Press Release: SnapStream Media Launces Beyond TV 4.3
June 8th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Webadmin looks very good. Good job Snapstream. The community can even add-on to webadmin, COOL!!!
Wonder what cards they tested which had the ATI Theater 650 chipset. Are any of the cards for sale now?
June 8th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Intel Optimization? What about AMD Athlon64 x2??
DivX v6.1 Changelog
New:
- Full support for single CPU, HyperThreaded (HT), dual CPU (SMP) and dual core processors. Encoding performance is improved up to 180% for HT CPUs and up to 250% for Dual Core + HT.
June 8th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
And Still not even a hint as to when BM/BTV integration will happen ?
June 9th, 2006 at 6:19 am
Does it support DVB-T yet? No? I didn’t think so. Just another set of pointless small tweaks that are of no interest to me.
Hey, Snapstream! Why don’t you stop procrastinating and actually get on with the features we were promised over a year ago?
June 9th, 2006 at 7:52 am
BM/BTV?
June 9th, 2006 at 11:47 am
[...] SnapStream Blog » Blog Archive » Beyond TV 4.3 Delivers More TV! Today, Beyond TV 4.3 delivers more TV to my HTPC. Beyond TV now supports ShowSqueeze for HDTV recordings! I can take massive ATSC transport streams and ShowSqueeze them down to a very manageable DivX or Windows Media format files. Beyond TV 4.3 also strips out the extra sub-channel information so recordings are already up to 50% smaller. [...]
June 9th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
This will free up a lot of hard drive space for me at 9 Gb an hour for HDTV recordings. The Winter Olympics used up most of my 2×400 striped RAID, and I’ve only kept one or two nights because of the size.
June 9th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
Hi,
I recently tried your 4.2 trial version but when i tried to record programs or watch live tv the vidoe was choppy. When i went back to the 3.4 version it worked fine again. Is it a way I can do another trial with the 4.3 version before I buy it so that I know it will work.
June 9th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
Hello Edward,
Yes, you can try Beyond TV again with version 4.3. And if you encounter problems again, please do contact tech support and see if they can help you.
Soham
June 9th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
ShowSqueeze for HDTV recordings! That is a huge help. I use a HDTV tuner card to record free Over The Air shows, but I only have a standard definition TV to watch on. The ability to shrink the shows will be a huge help.
Thanks for the new feature.
June 9th, 2006 at 8:19 pm
So is Divx included / Installed? Or do I need to purchase it?
June 10th, 2006 at 12:40 am
I am still waiting for simple “closed captioning” TV viewing and recording?
June 10th, 2006 at 11:00 am
Beyond TiVo Buzz
TiVo has been publishing their Season Pass stats for a while now. They list the 25 most recorded shows for the previous week along with Director Wishlist and Actor Wishlist rankings. By doing this TiVo offers insight into what everyone…
June 11th, 2006 at 10:23 am
I just upgraded to 4.3. While watching live tv, I hit “info”, and the show details no longer say the start and end time of a show (like “11:00 - 11:30″). It is not there in 4.3 and I could swear that was there in the previous version. Can anyone verify this for me?
June 12th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
hey rich, congrats you found a bug that was missed by the testers and everyone in the beta program. it’s now on dock for btv 4.4. thanks for the feedback.
dennis, the divx codecs are included with Beyond TV.
to everyone asking about various other features, we hear you. we are listening to you as well as the data coming back from various surveys. several of the features in beyond tv 4.3 come directly from customer feedback. we’re considering all of your feedback along with our strategy as a company and constructing the feature sets for each release.
soham
June 13th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Hi,
I intend to use Beyond TV to record video and transfer it to my Palm. It runs mp4 (like iPod video). It could be possible?
[]’s
June 14th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
wilson,
btv does not directly transform video to mp4. but there was a blog post that explained how to convert video for an ipod. so you may be able to use the same steps:
http://blogs.snapstream.com/2005/12/19/give-the-gift-of-tv-with-an-ipod-video-loaded-with-shows/
soham
June 14th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
I have been asking BTV support about the lack of support for mpeg4 that my HDTV card supports in native mode. They appear to not know what I am talking about because they never answer me, yet they write to me and ask if I have gotten an answer to my question yet.
Does anyone but me wonder what happened to MPG4 support for the ATI HDTV Wonder? It would allow me to change modes from MPG1, 2, or 4 on the fly, but once I started using BTV it was locked at MPG2 and would not allow the others formats. Can anyone explain this? Please reply to massimj@hotmail.com Thanks, Joe
June 14th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
Couldn’t agree more with what Neil said. I bought SnapStream with a plan to go digital when I replaced my hardware.
SnapStream is a great product, except for the whole problem of not being able to watch digital television in Australia. Pfft.
If you live in a country with DVB-T, save yourself the wait: Just use MythTV or MediaPortal.
June 14th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
I’m still waiting for BTV to give us picture in picture support. Am I the ONLY one in the world who would use such a feature?
Also, I like the way other products allow you to surf the channel guide while watching TV. Why doesnt BTV do this? A transparent menu would be nice, or even just squeeze the picture to the top 2/3 of the screen with 3 rows of channel guide at the bottom to flip through would be nice.
June 14th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
I don’t have an HDTV card and don’t plan on getting one.. would there be any reason for me to upgrade to the newer versions?
I keep getting emails about upgrade discounts, but seems like the biggest selling point for the newer version is HDTV… would there be any benefit for non-HDTV shows?
June 14th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
Wouldn’t it be a little more logical to have patches for all the problems that pop up each time a new BTV is released, instead of forcing everyone to wait a few monthes until the next version is released?
There have been many incredibly annoying little bugs in the past few releases (for example the wireless mouse bug in 4.0). These problems always seem to be fixed before they are even mentioned in the forums — but we are forced to wait a few monthes till SS releases the fix in the next version.
Also, doesn’t it seem like these releases are going up in .1 increments faster than the original 4.0 flagship features are fixed? How long until we have to buy 5.0 in order to get these features?
June 14th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
the old snapstream never worked right why should I bye the new one.
June 14th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Cox Cable has been adding many new channels to their channel offerings. Many new channels have been on the air for many months, but they are not listed in the snapscreen lineup so I have to record them manually.
How do I get the snapscreen lineup to display all of the channels I normally get on my TV?
June 14th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
When is unencrypted QAM support going to be available for BTV? My DVICO card supports it and their software works with it. Over cable, I get all the local stations in HD unencrypted QAM. But OTA I get limited channels. I was expecting this support to come by now. But I’ve been thinking you guys would have it supported by now. I heard there were legal issues (which doens’t make sense to me)… Maybe someone can explain this.
June 14th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
I am very happy that SnapStream continues to listen to customer feedback and regularly provide upgrades. I’m an exclusive HDTV user and was glad to hear ShowSqueeze now works with HDTV programming. Obviously there are a lot of enhancements and fixes that people are still hoping for, but what’s important is that SnapStream continues to work at perfecting their product. This means that, eventually, everyone will have a reason to upgrade. I’m very happy with how 4.x has been working for me–the new features in 4.3 are just a bonus.
June 14th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
Joe,
We do not support the native MPEG4 coming natively from a card. Some cards also offer MPEG1. MPEG2 support is the most standardized across tuner cards, so that’s why we’ve primarily focused on that.
Chovain & Ryan, thanks for the feedback.
Steve,
HD is definitely a big selling point in Beyond TV 4, but there are definitely a lot of other reasons to upgrade: DivX support, browse by category, an updated look and feel, unlimited tuners, and lots and lots of other fixes and improvements. Here’s a list of everything in BTV 4: http://www.snapstream.com/products/beyondtv/upgrade.asp
Even if you ignore the HD stuff, I think that it’s worth the jump, but if you’re happy with version 3, that’s cool too.
Patrick,
We’re trying to strike the right balance between the overhead of testing/releasing and getting fixes out quickly. I’m not sure we always get it right, but there’s also a cost in releasing too frequently which will make it all the more difficult to get to the features that people are also waiting for. So it’s definitely a balancing act. I think that we release pretty frequently. If you want to stay absolutely on top of latest code/fixes, than I suggest getting involved with the beta program.
Richard,
Things could be going wrong in a number of different places:
1) Beyond TV is now displaying all of the channels because they are hidden.
2) Beyond TV is not getting all of the channels from SnapStream.Net.
3) We’re not getting all of the channels because Cox has not updated our data provider with the new data.
So please contact tech support so they can get to the root of the problem.
Hello Kirk,
I think that the legal issues come more into play with CableCard. But the issue with unecrypted QAM is more that no tuner card supports it with BDA drivers. You can’t do it in a generic way right now. Some cards offer support in some proprietary way and that’s why the only software that supports them is the manufacturer’s software. There’s not a lot we can do about that at this time.
Robert, thanks for the positive word! It keeps us jazzed to keep putting in the extra effort. At the end of the day, we all use this software at home too, and want it to work and be fun.
Soham
June 14th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
I’m a sports watcher — have you any plans to add slow motion to view/replay? Just a key that toggles slow motion playback, maybe 1/3 speed, 1/8 speed, whatever? I realize it would result in a jerky picture, but I’d still like it.
And while you’re at it, how about freeze frame and frame advance/back?
June 14th, 2006 at 8:24 pm
No offense guys, but when is technical support coming out of Beta? I’m still waiting on a fix for a problem reported last September in version 3.7.2!
June 14th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
forgot one thing i’d like to see. Color coded channel guide… when i’m surfing for sports, i’d like to see green, or red for movies, etc.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:57 am
HI
A couple of years ago I bought Snapstream 3 and a happauge 250 card to setup a dual tuner machine. I have my label that have the numbers AXA32000868 and 321180-001 rev A. I can’t see to find the email that it was registered to and I need it so I can upgrade to beyond 4 point whatever this time with a pair of ATI’s, a X800XT and a TV PRO WONDER and I do still have that happauge card, would you recommend putting in this box for a 3 tuner system? I’ve spent a lot of money building this HTPC and I want to be sure tha\is one will work. I can faw you faces of the box and the label if you need proof or owership.
Please let me know as d\soon as possible and I also own a Pinnacle Moviebox USB and AV\DB recording devices and it would be excellent* if you could b\make software to use them as if they were the I/O interfaces to digital domain based VCR type thing…. let me know the dispisitution of my account. the domains I might be under are:
tinkertoytech.com
sihope.com
yahoo.com
please find my old account information I want a update and the remote could be useful too if it works with everything on the PC and not just in snapsteream.
Thank you
Bryant Thompson
2069 Viburnum Trail
Eagan MN 551222-2354
651-454-8372
June 15th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Wow, Bryant. You forgot to post your social security number…
June 15th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
I love BTV. I do have a few suggestions (maybe for BTV 5):
1) It would be nice if BTV could recognize when two different stations are playing the same tv show — it often records the same show on different stations.
2) It would be great if you could easily break up tv shows to burn onto several disks. I know you can just burn it to a DVD, but some very basic video handling software would be nice.
3) If there’s a show that I want to save, I would love to be able to save the show without the commercials. If I could somehow mark where the commercials are when I watch the show for the first time and have BTV take care of the rest, that would be awesome. You guys might even be able to use the data to further develop the show squeeze algorithm.
4) I don’t know if this is possible, but I would love it if there was an option to allow BTV to record shows if the computer is restarted (due to a power outage for example). I’m guessing that this is impossible for XP — since you have to log on before BTV starts up.
5) Wouldn’t it be great if there was a “record all episodes that I haven’t seen yet” option for recording shows. I think there’s a lot of potential for increasing the recording options. For example, it would be great if BTV constantly looks for shows about Foo if I’m a big Foo fan and offers to record it for me.
6) I haven’t upgraded to 4.3 yet; so, I don’t know if you guys already have this. Offering suggested shows for recording based on what I watch would be nice.
7) I know this is easier said than done. Sometimes the tv schedule information is not updated, and I can’t tell what is going to be on in the next couple of days. Please fix this.
June 16th, 2006 at 1:43 am
Add me to the “WAITING FOR CLOSED CAPTIONING” list. Why is this basic technology being ignored?
June 17th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
I downloaded Beyond TV 4.3 and loaded the program to update my existing Beyond TV 4.0, Wnen the program opened I got a screen that said “could not initialize Direct 3D - check that latest version of DirectX is correctly installed on your system - also Make sure that this program was compiled with header files that match the installed DirectX.” Then I closed the screen and the program of course did not run. My question is what specific DirectX version do I need to download to make Beyond TV work again? Also. how exactly do I check to see if the header files match the installed DirectX? Please advise if you can and thanks……….
June 18th, 2006 at 2:58 am
I would like to try the trial version of 4.3, but before I do that, I need to get the OEM version 3.8.0 that came with the ADS InstantHDTV tuner card that I bought to work. I am able to watch and record HDTV manually with this version, but I can’t get the guide to work. The guide currently shows everything as “unavailable”.
There is a warning at the bottom right of my screen (yellow triangle). When I click on that, it shows the folllowing message.
“Beyond TV has detected that Norton Internet Security is running. In order for Beyond TV to run properly, Norton Internet Security must be configured to allow Beyond TV to access the internet and open several ports.”
I tried disabaling Norton Internet Security, but the message still shows up as running. I’m not sure which ports to open and how to open them.
Thanks,
Randy
June 18th, 2006 at 6:28 am
I’ve been using BTV for a few months now and have enjoyed it thoroughly. I’m not up on all the technical details that others have mentioned here, and I’m sure that there are lots of things that could be added to the product that would make it better. But I have to say that this software is AWESOME.
For those who’ve been digitally recording for a long while it might be old news, but for me this is the best product around. I am thrilled with how well the product works.
Thank you.
Oh, and for the person who thinks you have to log onto XP after every restart - there is a way around that. You can edit the registry at hkey_local_machine\software\microsoft\windows NT\currentversion\winlogon you need two strings - AltDefaultUserName (the username you want to use) and AutoAdminLogon (set to ‘1′) . There’s more info at the MS knowledgebase if I’ve left something out.
Thanks again Snapstream!
June 20th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
So the recorded HD program from 4.3 is much more flexible than the 4.2 made recording. I wonder if Nero 6 will recognize the HDTV recording made with 4.3 and reduce it to put it on a DVD? If the type of file is exactly the same I guess the update won’t make much difference. If it works, I can clear off a lot of stuff on my drive that really isn’t good enough to watch again, (or I’d rent or buy it), but too good to delete right now.
June 20th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
While no one has made the perfect software yet (Apple is close and if Snapstream did for the Mac what it has done for the PC…, but I digress), I have to say that I have been quite happy with BTV since I first learned of it in a review in the MaximumPC magazine. Yes, being an ATI video card owner, I have had more than my fair share of issues (i.e. constant corruption leading to shows not recorded), but I also have lots of obvious good experiences based on a couple of terabytes of recorded TV littered throughout my network.
I understand as a smaller company with a successful product it is hard to keep up with all of the demands. I think it would go a long way though to start concentrating a little more on fixing identified issues before moving on to new features otherwise you run the risk of mimicking the don’t care attitude of a certain software giant. I still experience issues on my wife’s machine (sporting an AIW 9700) even with the newest ATI drivers installed from scratch. The more stable the product, the happier peopel will be from the outset.
Feature-wise, you know that someone will always be unhappy with that feature they really want the most remaining missing in action. That said, I thihnk the one that BTV really needs to get in gear and get done is to have BTV run as a service so that restarts do not mean missed shows. I live in Ontario, Canada and brownouts are frequent in this power-starved province. As such, even with my machine on a UPS, a few times a year it will be out longer than the battery can handle and I lose the next programs until I remember to go log the machine in. There are more items, but I will post another time on those. Get me “install as a service” and you will have a loyal user for life.
One last note, to the idiots that simply come in here to put BTV’s efforts down, make no constructive suggestions, plug other products and to generally make an ass of yourself, please go do it somewhere else and on someone else’s time. We really would like to help our community continue to grow and develop into the best there is. Your element is respectfully unwelcome in here working contrary to that goal.
Thanks for your time. Keep up the great work Snapstream. I coudl not watch all those primetime shows without you.
Victor
June 22nd, 2006 at 4:16 pm
Victor said: “One last note, to the idiots that simply come in here to put BTV’s efforts down, make no constructive suggestions, plug other products and to generally make an ass of yourself, please go do it somewhere else and on someone else’s time. We really would like to help our community continue to grow and develop into the best there is. Your element is respectfully unwelcome in here working contrary to that goal.”
I’d be happy to take my unconstructive suggestions elsewhere if it weren’t for the fact that Snapstream lied to us about working on DVB-T long before BeyondMedia and BeyondTV 4 were ever released. Since then they’ve made several (what I consider to be) minor revisions to the product without tackling any of the real features that customers have been crying out for.
In this article (http://blogs.snapstream.com/2005/08/05/wilkommen-bonjour-and-hello/) dated August 2005, Snapstream said: “Our developers are hard at work on DVB-T/S support, because we know you want it, but it’s not quite ready to ship just yet.” Since then, the official line is that DVB-T is not on the horizon, and Snapstream’s own CEO has stated in an interview that they haven’t even begun looking at it. That makes Snapstream’s PR Co-ordinator a liar.
If Snapstream stopped their hard-sell approach of e-mailing every other week because I haven’t yet purchased BTV 4, I’d be more forgiving. Unfortunately their marketing doesn’t feature a reply button that lets me explain why I haven’t yet upgraded, and that I won’t until they offer the features we were promised and that I can get elsewhere from both commercial competitors and from free and open-source software.
I like BeyondTV, I really do, and I can’t stress that enough. If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t still be here. I agree with Victor about making the community grow, and it’s to that end I’ve developed and released several ‘tuner driver’ add-ons for BeyondTV that help it to integrate with set-top boxes, completely free of charge to the community. If you still think my input is truly unwelcome, Victor, then I will apologise and leave.
Finally, in an effort to say something that Victor might consider constructive, have you considered configuring your PC to auto-login? That’s what my dedicated HTPC does. After a power cut, the PC powers up, logs in, runs BeyondTV and carries on from wherever it left off.
June 24th, 2006 at 7:24 am
Victor et al, as you will easily find out if you were to search the internet, it is rather easy to make Windows XP auto-logon. You can also easily make BTV start at startup. Therefore, there is no need to make BTV a service, in fact making BTV service AFAIK won’t help since services usually only start when you log on anyway. Making BTV a service is stupid for other reasons.
But it’s a pity to see Snapstream continues to completely ignore the DVB-T market aka most of the world…
June 25th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
Beyond TV is an excellent product . I still have version3.7.2 or something. My problem is how do I adjust the security logon password of webadmin and add other users and assigen them specific passwords. Is it better in version 4.3?? I don’t want my friends or family to have full access to the set up options on webadmin since they sometimes delete a file or something gets messed up. Thanks and keep up the hard work. You have an excellent product despite the bugs here and there.
June 26th, 2006 at 2:17 am
I also think that Beyond TV is an excellent product, well done… It’s just a shame that I’m still stuck in the 3.x days waiting for international HDTV support (or at least DVB-T for Australia!).
June 29th, 2006 at 1:16 am
exellent no question about it
June 29th, 2006 at 7:29 am
I use BTV 4.3 to record HD shows then burn them to DVD to watch on my DVD player and HDTV. This works well but is time consuming since I need to transcode the .tp file (with HDTV2DVD) in order to burn it to DVD. That takes 2.5 hours for a hour long show. Mine is an old DVD player, so I doubt very much that it will play DivX files.
If I record in DivX mode, how can I then burn a DVD to play on my old DVD player? And would such a proces be faster?
Thanks
Bruce
P.S. Love the product and the frequent upgrades!
June 30th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
Now if only someone would port BeyondTV Link to Mac OSX (now that the macs are Intel and support universal binary :-).
July 1st, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Well, I upgraded to 4.3. Sorry I did because NOW BTV link on my dell 600M laptop just stutters and stutters. It used to work fine on 4.2.
What did you guys do ? How can I fix this? It seems that the CPU usage has skyrocketed in this new build. Now I have a link I can no longer use
July 5th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Mike,
My first suggestion is to make sure that you also upgraded BTV Link to 4.3. If you have and are still having problems, please direct your question to tech support.
Soham
July 7th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
Overall BTV is a great product. It definately has a simpler to use interface than the competition. My wife and 5 year old son can actually use this software.
As a software developer myself, I do have a few comments.
1) Any unattended application, such as the BTV background processes, should run as a service. Period, no further debate. Services start immediately upon boot of Windows, do not require a logon, and are easily controlled from a remote PC. Also, the whole reason that MS created the service architecture was to support that type of application.
2) Each release needs to contain a balance of fixes and new features. The fixes are to keep your existing customers happy and the new features pull in new customers. The hard part is figuring out the balance. Overall Snapstream does a decent job at this, but I do believe it is an area for improvement.
3) Each “official” release of a program does cost quite a bit of money for Snapstream so hats off to them for releasing numbered versions as frequently as they do.
4) It would be nice if Snapstream would create hot fixes for problems as they are discovered that can be direct emailed to people having significant problems. This would allow Snapstream to fix the machines of people that contact Tech Support directly, but would also keep the number of client PCs with beta or alpha level software to a minimum.
5) Every single post about new features and up coming releases involves a lot of discussion about unencrypted QAM and DVB-T. This should be an indicator to get on the ball and get it coded. There is an obvious revenue stream that is being ignored by not getting these features released. As far as there being no generic BDA drivers for QAM, forget about generic. Pick the card that you like best and code specifically for it. This would allow you to claim a feature that none of your competitors have and it would make the complainers shut up.
July 17th, 2006 at 10:04 am
I’d really appreciate an answer to this question which I asked earlier:
If I record in DivX mode, how can I then burn a DVD to play on my old DVD player? And would such a process be faster?
Thanks
Bruce
July 18th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
bruce,
we don’t monitor the blogs actively especially on older posts, so the best way to get immediate answers is through tech support. so sorry for the delay…
some authoring applications can take any format (including DivX) and create DVDs. however, this will not be faster since the authoring software will have to recompress the file to MPEG2 first. so if your goal is to create DVDs, it’s fastest to use the DVD ready MPEG2 format for your recordings.
soham
July 23rd, 2006 at 10:39 pm
Overall BTV is an excellent product. Been using it for over a year w/o any major problems.
However, with 4.3 upgrade after mpeg files are compressed as wmv files,
(1) the date of the recording is changed to the showsqueeze date (if a file is recorded 7/21, compressed on 7/23, then the “new” date is 7/23. This is not consistent with earlier 4.x products and not a good “feature” in my opnion.
(2) file is renamed as -.wmv in the BTV menu
(3) all show info (channel, time/date) no longer shows in the “new” compressed file info
July 25th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
BTV Buzz has lots of potential. However, I find it quite useless when 7 of the top 15 shows are duplicates. Seems like this should have been thought of in development…
Top Recorded Episodes (7/17/2006 - 7/23/2006)
1 Eureka - Pilot
2 Stargate SG-1 - Morpheus
3 Stargate Atlantis - Misbegotten
4 MythBusters - Steam Cannon
5 The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
6 The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
7 The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
8 The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
9 Psych - Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Piece
10 Monk - Mr. Monk and the Big Game
11 General Hospital
12 The 4400 - Blink
13 The Colbert Report
14 The Colbert Report
15 The Colbert Report
November 17th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
any way to change the datestamp on show squeezed files from being at the end of the file name to the beginning? I’ve got a php list that generates html with links to the wmv files that have been showsqueezed and would like to list them by date but now it is alphabetical. So, that would help a lot!
November 20th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Or, if you can point me to which file needs to be changed to make that happen, I have the source code that I downloaded from snapstream’s site and can do the edit just for my copy here.
November 24th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
The only way to fix this would be to change the name of the file before it is ShowSqueezed. Or you could possibly achieve this with a script of some sort. But unfortunately, there is no quick fix in the software.
February 9th, 2007 at 2:00 am
Just bought 4.5 to use with my mce a180 high definition tv card…works fine for about 10 minutes and then the video freezes
August 16th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Overall BTV is an excellent product. Been using it for over a year w/o any major problems.