Installation / Configuration

Installing Beyond TV is fairly straightforward, provided your computer meets its hardware requirements. Although Beyond TV works with TV tuner cards that do not provide hardware MPEG-2 compression, it will greatly improve your experience if you choose a card that does. In fact, Beyond TV will run adequately on a relatively modest machine (mine is an old AMD Duron 700 clocked at 900 MHz) as long as the capture card provides on-board MPEG-2 encoding. Otherwise, your minimum CPU requirements jump to 1.5 GHz.

You will also want a substantial amount of hard drive space available for recording shows, at least 40 GB. Beyond TV features "transcoding" to help reign in its disk usage. We will discuss transcoding a little later.

Actually installing and configuring the software is very straightforward – the installation wizard guides you through every step very clearly. You will notice that Beyond TV is not an insubstantial piece of software; the setup process takes some time, but with version 4 they appear to have nailed it. I had zero problems when installing 4. Ensure you have the latest drivers for both your regular video card and your video capture card to minimize any potential headaches.

Usage: General TV Watching

While Beyond TV can be used on any PC with a compatible video capture card, where it really shines is in the living room hooked up to your TV or home theatre. The interface works well when driven by a mouse, and it can be run in a window if you'd prefer to get some work done on your PC as you watch, however full-screen mode driven by a remote control is where you want to be to get the most out of your PVR experience.

As mentioned above, as you watch live TV you have the option to pause, rewind and replay the video. This is made possible because everything you are seeing through Beyond TV is actually being captured by your video capture card, encoded into an MPEG-2 stream (either by the card or your CPU), then finally displayed on the screen. On my very modest system, the delay is between 1 to 3 seconds as compared to real-time TV – no big deal.

Almost everything in Beyond TV is configurable, but happily, the default settings are terrific out of the box. If you have the hard drive space to spare, I would recommend cranking up the size of your real-time video buffer to allow for 1 hour of video at the display quality you have chosen. This means that a live TV show can be paused for up to an hour before it will be forced to continue.

Usage: Scheduling recordings, recurring recordings

Like TiVo and most digital cable and satellite systems, Beyond TV offers an onscreen guide of what's on. Unlike TiVo, Beyond TV offers this service free of charge. Watching or recording a show is as simple as choosing it from the program guide and choosing Watch or Record.

If you choose to record a show, you are then given the option of recording that one instance of the show, recording all instances of the show on that channel, or recording all new instances of the show on that channel. This last option is the most interesting, as it effectively emulates TiVo's "season pass" functionality and allows you never to miss a new episode of your favorite show.

Additional features: transcoding, commercial skipping, recording show in progress

Some of the features that make Beyond TV unique include its transcoding functionality, its ability to analyze video and determine where the commercials are, and its ability to record a show in progress.

Transcoding
Transcoding is the act of taking video in one format and coding it into a different format. Beyond TV supports both Microsoft's Windows Media Video format, as well as the very popular DivX format for transcoded video. The beauty of this functionality is that Beyond TV can be set to automatically transcoded shows that are recorded in the default bulky MPEG-2 format into a much more space-conscious WMV or DivX AVI file. From a functional perspective, the user doesn't even need to know whether they're watching a file that has or hasn't yet been transcoded. The file size savings are enormous – for example, a typical 1 hour program takes upwards of 3 GB of drive space. After transcoding to Windows Media format at very high quality (so as not to degrade the video), the resulting file is less than 700 MB. This is convenient because it can then be easily burned onto a CD for archival purposes, but is also a better than 4:1 file size ratio. In other words, the resulting file is less than one quarter the size of the original. This can save on your drive space requirements considerably.

Commercial Skipping
Although Beyond TV won't automatically skip commercials for you, it can analyze a show after it has been recorded and determine with a high degree of accuracy where the commercial breaks are. Once an analysis is complete, it will color these commercial breaks in the progress bar that shows when you are fast-forwarding video. This makes it a snap to skip right through commercial breaks. Of course this analysis takes some time, so if your computer is underpowered it is best to leave this feature off so that all unused CPU cycles can go towards transcoding your shows.

Fortunately, Beyond TV allows you to scan forward and backwards through your show as well as skipping ahead and back by a set number of seconds. The default for skipping ahead is 30 seconds, which is of course exactly what we want when skipping through commercial segments. Click, click, click – back to our show.

Recording a Show in Progress
One of the newest features in Beyond TV 4.0 is the ability to start recording a show that is currently in progress. What this means is that if you're watching a show and you get part way through it and think "darn, I wish my spouse could see this", you can start recording the show and it will pick up everything you have in the cache for that show. Typically this means that it will be able to record the show from when it started, as long as you have not changed the channel. You'd be surprised how handy this feature is. 

Software review conclusion

Building a PVR solution for Windows can't be easy, and yet SnapStream has a solid product on their hands. For anyone that wishes to have PVR functionality but can't afford to buy a Microsoft Media Edition PC, Beyond TV is the logical choice. They even offer a free trial version of the software so that you can test it out to see if it does the trick for you.

Probably my favorite aspect of Beyond TV is that it allows me to take an old computer and repurpose it in a very useful manner. My PVR setup (that my family has been using very successfully for the past two and a half years) consists of the older AMD Duron PC mentioned above with 384 MB of RAM, an 8 GB and 30 GB drive, a $30 Matrox video card with S-Video out (to go to the TV), and a $150 Hauppauge TV Tuner card with MPEG-2 encoding. That's it. The thing shouldn't still work, and yet it does.

We had a minor hardware failure on it some time ago (the system drive died and had to be replaced), and for the few days we were without a PVR, my family discovered just how much our TV viewing habits have changed. My wife and I don't actually know what time shows are on anymore, and with young kids in the family we'd be unable to watch most shows that are on before they go to bed anyway. My two-year-old son has become used to the idea that he always has a new episode of The Wiggles, Thomas the Tank Engine or Blues Clues recorded that he can watch to ease his way into naptime – just imagine the bundle that saves us on kids' videos!

Contrary to popular belief, a PVR doesn't make you watch more TV, it helps you watch more good TV, and less TV overall. Rather than plunking down in front of the boob tube and watching a bunch of terrible shows waiting for something good to come on, we sit down, watch a show or two, and shut it off. It's a much more satisfying experience. We were even able to cut our cable subscription down to the basic package, since all the shows we wanted to record are available on it at weird times – but who cares what time the show is aired?

If you've been wanting to put together your own PVR, Beyond TV is a very good way to go.