[opendtv] A Journey Beyond TV

Hello, 
See: 
  http://www.denguru.com/2006/06/29/snapstream_beyond_tv_4_3/


At a Glance 

Product 
SnapStream Beyond TV (Version 4.3) 

Summary 
Digital PVR for WinXP or 2000 with extensive compression features, HD 
support 
and integrated commercial mark and skip 

Pros 
? Automatic integrated commercial detection and one touch commercial 
skipping 
? Automatic integrated compression tools with multiple formats and quality 
settings 
? Support for a wide variety of hardware 
? Online remote management of recordings 
? Simple and straightforward installation 
? Help box to explain each menu item's function 
? Great community support 

Cons 
? Full "media center" features require separate program (Beyond Media) 
? Utilitarian interface could use a more polished look. 
? Must use web-browser to access full feature set 

(...)

Dvico HDTV Tuner

I used the Dvico FusionHDTV5 Lite (Figure 3) for this project. Dvico 
offers a wide 
variety of ATSC (High definition) TV Tuners. The FusionHDTV5 Lite is 
capable of 
capturing over the air high definition television signals by using a 
fifth-generation 
vestigial sideband tuner that receives the 8VSB modulation signal, which 
is used to 
broadcast free digital television to your standard over-the-air HD 
antenna. (8VSB is 
used in the United States and Canada.)

The FusionHDTV5 Lite uses a unique type of software decoding engine. 
Unlike some of 
the cheaper software-based SD (standard definition) tuner cards that 
offload part of 
their capture process to the CPU, the FusionHDTV5 Lite instead offloads a 
portion of 
its processing tasks to the host computer's graphics processor. Since the 
graphics 
card is mostly idle when you're not using it to play a game, it's a 
perfect candidate 
to assist the tuner to capture video without needlessly bogging down the 
CPU.

(...)

I was definitely surprised to find that Snapstream is willing to risk 
offering advanced 
advertisement skipping in BTV. Advertisement-detection technology is a 
controversial topic. 
There is a lot of money to be lost by cable and broadcast companies if 
advertisements are 
easily skipped. A lawsuit involving another PVR program called Replay TV 
got a lot of 
attention a few years ago. Then, owners of Replay TV were sued for 
offering a 30-second 
skip option that was designed to skip whole commercials one at a time. 
Although the 
30-second skip feature is widely used now, most commercial media PC 
software developers 
seem unwilling to develop more advanced commercial skipping options such 
as SmartSkip. 

(...)

Conclusions

Snapstream's BTV is a top-notch product. It was easy to set up, configure 
and use. 
Since Snapstream chose to develop BTV as a PVR-only application, I can't 
make an overall 
comparison with other HTPC media programs. But I can compare PVR 
functions, which I'll 
do with Windows MCE and SageTV. If you want to skip the commentary, just 
check out Table 2.

Table 2: PVR Function comparison with MCE and Sage TV
                        BTV                             MCE     SageTV
Program Guide           Ok                              Ok      Uses color 
coding
Search                  Ok                              Better than BTV 
Better than BTV
Output File Format      Multi-standard          Proprietary Multi-standard
On-screen Help          Yes                             No      No
Home Menu                       Ok                              More 
intuitive than BTV      More confusing than BTV
Access to all functions Need Web interface      Via main interface Via 
main interface

(...)

Clearly the commercial-detection and file-compression tools are the 
features that set BTV apart. 
SmartSkip functions beautifully. While total removal of commercials would 
be ideal, you have to 
consider that SnapStream stuck their necks out far considering the legal 
implications by adding 
SmartSkip as it is. I found that I didn't mind the one-button commercial 
block skipping. It's so 
easy to use that it's almost as if the commercials are not there anyway. 
StreamSnip is an interesting 
approach to trimming down HD files without losing any quality. It allows 
you to store a lot more 
uncompressed HD content on your system, and StreamSnip serves as a nice 
tool to get the HD 
files ready for third-party editing and compression programs.


Enjoy, greetings, 
-- Jeroen

+-------------------------------+------------------------------------------+
| From:     Jeroen H. Stessen   | E-mail:  Jeroen.Stessen@xxxxxxxxxxx |
| Building: SFJ-5.22 Eindhoven  | Deptmt.: Philips Applied Technologies |
| Phone:    ++31.40.2732739     | Visiting & mail address: Glaslaan 2 |
| Mobile:   ++31.6.44680021     | NL 5616 LW Eindhoven, the Netherlands |
| Skype:  callto:jeroen.stessen | Website: http://www.apptech.philips.com/ 
|
+-------------------------------+------------------------------------------+

 
 
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