One of the biggest inconveniences involved with upgrading to Windows Vista is all of the potential software and hardware incompatibilities that may pop up once you are ready to go. As with software drivers, there will also be programs that simply just won't work.
Over at the Snapstream blog there is a piece which brings to light the specific state that Beyond TV is in with regards to Windows Vista.
The current version of Beyond TV (4.5) is not fully compatible with Vista, but if you hold on, version 4.6 is scheduled to ship "very soon now". This new version will contain a wide variety of bug fixes which will make it fully compatible with Windows Vista.
So if you are a Beyond TV user who is thinking about switching to Vista, make sure you wait for this upgrade to save yourself some hassle. It's good to know that something is in the works.
Everyone likes to customize their PC with some pictures and themes, if its not a picture of some hot girl or a desert island on your desktop, it's a load of fishes swimming around on your screensaver.
The Snapstream community has created a nice set of skins for the BeyondTV PVR interface meaning your TV experience can now be that little more personalized too.
A selection of the skins available can be seen here including dolphin, desert island and pirate themes. Installing a skin is easy and requires simply replacing one file in the BeyondTV directory.
Anyone fancy making a PVR Wire theme? You know you want too!
Less than two weeks until Windows Vista comes out, and my computer up and dies on me. At first I thought it was the power supply, but it's not. It could be the CPU, the motherboard, anything really.
Well, I'd put a lot of money into my last computer which served double duty as my work machine and my PVR (since I write about PVRs, I guess it was really just my work machine). Anyway, it had a couple of hard drives, all of which survived intact, a couple of TV tuners, and an NVIDIA graphics card with a TV-out.
I decided the easiest thing to do would be go and find a sale at a nearby electronics shop, pick up a computer for under $500, and slap all of my old goodies inside. So far so good. But here's the thing. The new system came with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, and in a few weeks I'll qualify for a free upgrade to Windows Vista.
But one of the first things I did was disable the Media Center services from launching at startup so that I can reinstall BeyondTV and restore my scheduled recordings from a backup file. I've got hundreds of hours of programs that I've recorded in BeyondTV. They have smartchapters, a BeyondTV feature that makes it easy to see where the commercials are and skip them with one click. It doesn't always work perfectly, but it's better than a thirty second skip when it does work.
I've showsqueezed most of my recordings (a fancy word for compressing them to WMV or DivX files) so that I could fit more programs on my hard drive. And some of them have strange resolutions that really look best when played back in BeyondTV.
So I decided to stick with the software that I've been using. But is it silly of me not to treat this as an opportunity to play with MCE, and to have all the benefits that come with having a PVR that's integrated with my operating system? That said, I'm also going out of town for a week soon and it'd be nice if I know my PVR is set up and ready to record all my episodes of 24, Heroes, and Battlestar Galactica while I'm gone.
My co-writers here at PVR Wire have been giving you some gift ideas for the Festive season, but I thought I'd be a little different and tell you what not to buy.
TiVo Series 3. Before you start shouting 'TiVo is great' -- hold it right there. I know TiVo is great, I know the Series 3 is a damn fine PVR and I know HD is the must-have thing this Christmas, but I just don't think it's the right time to buy a Series 3. Most stores are selling it at $799 although Yahoo Shopping found one at $670. That's pretty expensive for a PVR, no matter how good it is. But I can guarantee the Series 3 will have a substantial price drop shortly after Christmas, and that will be a much better time to buy.
XP Media Center without an Express Vista Upgrade. If you're planning on buying a media center PC running Windows MCE, then make sure it has an Express Vista Upgrade. With the right manufacturer you can get a free upgrade to the Vista operating system when it comes out before March 31, thus saving yourself the hefty cost of upgrading later on down the line. If you decide you don't want to upgrade to Vista, then you don't have to, but at least you have the option.
Microsoft Zune – With so many excellent digital media players out on the market the Microsoft Zune just doesn't cut it. It's full of DRM and you have to hack it to do things that I would expect it to do as standard. I agree with Brad, the Archos 604 is a much more attractive option.
ReplayTV PC Edition – Turning a PC into a PVR is a great idea, but ReplayTV PC Edition is not the software to use. It lacks some much-needed features such as multiple tuner support, HDTV support, ability to stream video to other computers, and a free electronic program guide. It will cost you $99.95 with an additional $19.95 yearly fee. Sage TV and Beyond TV are a better option in my eyes, and you can always get basic PVR functionality for free with GB-PVR.
You may have noticed that we haven't had a new podcast in the last couple of weeks. This isn't because we aren't still dedicated to bringing you interviews with the people behind the PVRs. It's just been a busy couple of weeks. The PVR Wire podcast will return in January, if not sooner.
In the meantime, you can help by sending us ideas of people you think we should interview or topics you think we should cover in upcoming podcasts. Just click the "Contact Us" link, and be sure to put "Podcast" in your subject line.
And while you're waiting, here's a few of my favorite episodes that you may have missed.
NVIDIA's DualTV MCE TV tuner looks like a nice alternative to Hauppauge's WinTV-PVR-500MCE. But NVIDIA's drivers only let you install one card. So what do you do if you want to install 4 DualTV MCE's to create an 8-tuner PVR? Well, if you're Snapstream Media, you ask NVIDIA to pretty please let you test out some prerelease drivers.
That's exactly what the folks at Snapstream have done, with a set of DualTV MCE pre-release drivers (version 5.9.5.23) available for BeyondTV users. These drivers may not work if you want to install multiple cards for a SageTV, or Windows Media Center system.
Sure, it's great to have a Slingbox if you want to watch live or recorded TV on the go. You can plug it in to your TiVo, cable company PVR or other set top box. You can even plug it into a DVD changer to watch movies from your hotel room while you're on vacation.
But Sling Media hasn't includes codes to control PC-based PVRs like BeyondTV or SageTV.
I'm not entirely sure why you'd choose a Slingbox over the free Orb if you plan to stream content on your PC to another PC. But if you happen to be a Slingbox enthusiast, or have a Slingbox in the living room that you'd like to move into the office, this tweak might be what you're looking for.
This week we speak with Rakesh Agrawal, CEO and Founder of SnapStream Media. BeyondTV releases version 4.5 of its software today, which features a number of bug fixes, and one major new feature -- a plugin that allows for integrated DVD burning.
Existing users can upgrade for free, but the DVD burning plugin is $30, whether you're buying a new copy or upgrading. That's because SnapStream has to pay to license the DVD burning technology. Agrawal says rather than charging all users for a function that some may find unnecessary, BeyondTV went the plugin route.
For more information on how DVD burning is integrated into BeyondTV, and for Agrawal's thoughts about the impact Windows Vista (with Media Center built into several of the consumer-oriented versions) will have on the market for 3rd party solutions like BeyondTV.
At this point there's no shortage of ways to transfer video to an iPod. But hey, here's two more.
First up is iTube, a new application that lets you download YouTube videos to an iPod. All you have to do is enter the url of the video and iTube will download the video and convert it into an iPod-friendly format. It even imports it to iTunes for easy transfer to your iPod. iTube is free, but right now it only works with YouTube, and only on Windows computers. If you've got a Mac, check out DownloadSquad for a few other suggestions.
Next up, we've got a plugin for BeyondTV that lets you convert programs recorded on your computer to iPod format. It looks like a great little plugin, as it integrates with BeyondTV's interface, showing up as just another option on the program information screen. When you click "Copy to iPod" the plugin will convert the file and send it to iTunes for syncing with your iPod. Some users have had trouble getting the plugin to work, but it's free, and it seems to be under development. So if you've got BeyondTV and an iPod it might be worth checking out.
Over at the SnapStream blog, there is a simple post titled "New Beyond TV coming later this week...", which includes a little teaser in it. First off, they state that the new version will be out Thursday, and it will have "some of the usual bug fixes and minor improvements", but it will also have "one significant new feature".
Anyone have any insight into what this new "significant" feature will be? Could it be the inclusion of the "Columbus" website which we have mentioned a couple of times (here and here)? Or is it something more ominous and out of the blue? Either way we can expect an update on their blog soon.
Also in this post are two video clips comparing their old intro video, and their new intro video. Go over there and have a look and decide for yourself if the new video is a good change.
Rakesh Agrawal over at the SnapStream Blog has created what looks like a pretty useful took for anyone looking to put together a PC-based PVR or home theater PC.
Using Google's Custom Search Engine tool, the "PC DVR Search Engine" scans through 79 sites, including PVR Wire to find results for your search. Want to know what kind of software is out there? You're not in any way limited to SnapStream's BeyondTV, there's plenty of info available about SageTV, MythTV and other alternatives.
If there's anything left out, Rakesh wants to know about it so he can improve the search engine. So if you have a few minutes to check it out, it may just answer some of the lingering questions you've had about building a PVR. And if you know of some useful sites that have been omitted, let Rakesh know by posting a comment at the SnapStream Blog.
Snapstream has put out a call for beta testers for BeyondTV version 4.5. Snapstream has a long history of inviting users to beta test each release, so I can only assume that they've lost a few of their regular testers, or they're really looking for some serious feedback for the next release of their PVR software.
BeyondTV 4.5 is described as having "some very cool new features," but there's no word on what those features are. In recent releases BeyondTV has added support for HDTV, automated DivX compression, and searching for programs by category. I've had some problems with that DivX compression feature, so I've gone back to using Windows Media compression for now (allowing me to store hundreds of hours of programming on a 250GB hard drive), but BeyondTV seems to get a bit better at DivX with each new release.
Personally I'd love to see Snapstream implement XviD support. And there's been high hopes of a merger between BeyondTV and Beyond Media (a separate program for music, pictures, videos, weather and all those other things that Windows Media Center does natively). I doubt we'll see a combined BeyondTV and Beyond Media product until version 5.0 at the earliest though.
Oh yeah, and if you're beta testing Snapstream's community-based Columbus project, there's a special email address to use if you want to sign up for the BeyondTV beta. Either that means Columbus will be integrated into the next release, or there's just less paperwork to fill out since you're already in the system.
Today on SnapStream's blog there was news that they are currently looking for beta testers to try out their new, "web-based TV community and listings website". At the moment however, it looks like they are just focusing on the TV listings part of the program and the community stuff will follow at a later point.
The idea behind this site is to eventually replace the current SnapStream.net , with a new and more interactive site which will be integrated right into BeyondTV. For those of you who do not use BeyondTV, Snapstream.net is a user oriented webpage that you can utilize to among other things schedule recordings, using the Internet or a cell phone.
As some avid PVR Wire readers may recall, we brought news about this new site back in August but we haven't heard much about it since then. So does this mean that the project is going on to a new stage?
For those of you who are interested in being on the bleeding edge of these kinds of projects, all you have to do is fill out a survey (which can be found on their site) and wait and see if you are approved.
I recently posted about a tutorial on how to build a Mac Media Center and I wouldn't want to leave all the Windows users out so here is another tutorial for building a media center on a Windows PC.
An article on Server Guy explains how a media center PC was built from the following:
Shuttle PC
Athlon XP 2000 CPU
512MB RAM
300GB hard drive
nVidia GeForce 4600 video card
SnapStream's Beyond TV
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150
FireFly Remote
It just goes to show that you do not need a powerful PC to make a media center PC, in fact when I make my new media center PC for my living room I will be buying a very cheap, second hand PC and putting a big hard drive in it.
I'm sure most of you have heard of SnapStream's BeyondTV by now. For those of you that don't know it is a very popular PVR solution for getting TV on your PC.
If you don't have BeyondTV you might like to take a look at this short five minute video that takes you through the basic BeyondTV features. After all it is much easier to see something in action than it is to sit down and read about it.
The video simply takes you through the regular PVR features such as rewinding live TV and the 30 second skip. It also gives you a look at the electronic program guide and how you can easily record shows.
TiVo Series 3. Before you start shouting 'TiVo is great' -- hold it right there. I know TiVo is great, I know the 
Microsoft Zune – With so many excellent digital media players out on the market the Microsoft Zune just doesn't cut it. It's full of DRM and you have to 
You may have noticed that we haven't had a new podcast in the last couple of weeks. This isn't because we aren't still dedicated to bringing you interviews with the people behind the PVRs. It's just been a busy couple of weeks. The PVR Wire podcast will return in January, if not sooner.
Sure, it's great to have a 
