Beyond TV 4.7 Officially Released | A List Of Feature Upgrades & Improvements

Snapstream have now officially released the latest version of
Beyond
TV, their flagship Home Theater PC software.

This version is finally out of beta and has several very nice
and noticable feature upgrades.

Here’s a list of some of the bigger
ones:

1. Faster HDHomeRun Tuner – QAM
   tuning with Beyond TV and the HDHomeRun
   is now much faster. Before there was a delay when you first started a
   QAM channel. 

   Now with a setting change in the BTV webadmin, starting
   liveTV and changing channels for QAM channels are significantly
   improved.

2. Enhanced Line-up and change
   detection/correction.  Ability to edit a custom
   TV lineup.

3. Auto Load Shows to iTunes
   – As Snapstream mentioned on their blog, this might help out those
   people who were relying on iTunes to get their NBC programming (no
   longer available on iTunes)
   You can now showSqueeze to h.264 (this is for all of those Apple iPods
   and other Apple devices) including a podcast rss feed for iTunes.

    From
   the release notes “For you non-apple fanbois, we’ve also included a
   1280x720p h.264 profile that you can send your hd content to and save a
   ton of space whilst still looking good.” Note this is a paid plugin
   packaged with the DVD Burning plugin (if you already have the DVD
   burning plugin, you’ll get this feature also).


4. Transcoding Support for iPod and PSP format.
5. Pool multiple Hard Drives as one
   – Snapstream calls this feature “drive pooling: Pool several hard
   drives as one so Say Beyond TV can manage and distribute recordings
   between each of the drives. It’s simple and you can set it and forget
   it.
6. Beyond TV Link DVD Burning –
   you can now
   burn DVD’s right from the 10-foot BTV interface on your extender (Link)
   manchine. This feature has been available for the BTV server machine
   but until now you couldn’t add this plugin on the BTV/extender machine.
   Note: This will be a fee-based plugin)
7. iPhone or Smartphone Remote Control your
   BeyondTV – Snapstream is calling this feature the
   firefly nano (named after their firefly HTPC remote).

8. Automatic Community Recordings.
   In other words, it will take the top shows from other Beyond TV users (Beyond TV Buzz)
   and will then schedule them at the lowest priority on your BTV
   machine.  

   You can customize which of these “community”
   recordings
   actually record and how many of the top recordings you really want to
   add each day.

9. Multiple usb-uirt support –
   use and manage multiple USB-UIRT’s with one Beyond TV machine.
10. Xbox 360 Streaming fix:
    Showsqueezed wmv files can now be set as type “video” for your 360 to
    be able to stream them. This setting is in the Web Admin under advanced
    settings -> Miscellaneous Settings.
11. You can now set “record at this timeslot”
    to set up a show to record only at a certain time slot.
12. Enhanced Performance of the BTV User
    Interface (Viewscape)
    including but not limited to faster switching from screen-to-screen,
    faster program guide, faster input of almost all of the pages in
    BTV. 
13. While a recording is in process, you can extend
    the recording in progress by “xx” minutes.
14. Web Admin Upgrades: 
    There’s a host of upgrades to the online, BeyondTV web admin
    including: 
    1. RSS Feeds
       – get RSS feeds of upcoming recordings, recent recordings, disk space
       remaining and recent showsqueezed (compressed) recordings. 
       These feeds
       can include the hyperlink to open up a show or the hyperlink can be
       turned off.- (merged from the “community web admin”)
    2. Added a Web User
       Interface Scheduling
       Calendar – (merged from the “community web admin”)
    
    3. Faster start-up and
       performance for webadmin pages
    4. Addition of Ajax on some
       of the WebAdmin
       pages – (merged from the “community web admin”
15. Added log messages to
    the BTV Link
    (extender) machines
16. Ability to showsqueeze & create
    smartchapters en masse (batch mode).
17. Support for AverMedia A180 ATSC Card
18. MPEG-4 Playback / Transcode support
19. Support for showsqueeze (compression)
    from DVR-MS files 


There are more improvements included as well, but
those are the
bigger ones. This is a fairly significant release so anyone with Beyond
TV will want to upgrade.

There’s no integration of Beyond Media
(DVD, Music, etc) features with this one, but here’s hoping it is
released with the 5.0 version that must be coming before too awful
long.

Head over to Snapstream to download
and get started with the new Beyond TV 4.7

This article was written by Brent Evans, a tech & gadget enthusiast. It is licensed under the Creative Commons.