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Review: SnapStream Media Beyond TV 4
By Neal Colonius

May 22, 2006 7:36AM

Beyond TV 4 has all the features you would expect in a personal video recorder, providing ultimate control over TV viewing. You can use it with your keyboard, mouse, or a remote, including the Firefly remotes sold by SnapStream.

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Video enthusiasts considering a standalone DVR or a Windows

Media Center PC might be better served by another option: SnapStream's Beyond TV 4, a software package that, when combined with a TV tuner card, can turn your PC into a state-of-the-art personal video recorder.

Unlike DVRs from most cable TV providers, Beyond TV 4 includes a free, Web-based Electronic Program Guide (EPG) that allows Beyond TV to provide almost all the features that TiVo users rave about, without subscription fees.

And, unlike Windows Media Center, Beyond TV allows you to save your shows in several different formats, mark and skip commercials, and schedule recordings from anywhere you have an Internet connection. You can also play and pause live FM radio.

Look and Feel

Beyond TV's installation routine is a little involved, but the intelligent setup wizard works quite well, making the process almost painless. Setup includes not only getting the software installed, but also configuring the software to work with one or more TV tuners, an optional remote, and an IR blaster for controlling a cable box (if needed). Setting up the software also involves creating an account on SnapStream.net, the free Web-based program guide for Beyond TV users.

We installed Beyond TV 4.2 on a desktop PC running Windows XP with two TV tuners: a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 internal tuner card and a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2 external TV tuner. Basic analog cable was connected to each tuner. Both of these Hauppauge tuners have hardware encoders, which is recommended, but not required, by SnapStream. Hardware encoding relieves your PC of much of the heavy recording duty, allowing more than one show to be recorded at once.

Beyond TV can be used with inexpensive tuner cards without hardware encoders, but that leaves all the encoding to be done by software on your PC, requiring some serious processor horsepower. Recording a single show will use up half or more of a PC's resources.

Installation proceeded smoothly, though the software did note that the Hauppauge tuner drivers were out of date, and required an upgrade. After installation, the Beyond TV recording engine and several related applications ran in the background. The Beyond TV user interface, ViewScape, isn't a lot different than the Windows Media Center interface. The menu has only a few icons on each page with large text for easy viewing from across the room. (continued...)

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