Snapstream BeyondTV 4
posted Thursday, July 20th, 2006 by Andy Gore
TV capture cards are brilliant. Just slap a card in your PC, hook up an antenna or cable and you’ve got television programming playing on your PC. You can even buy cards that display HDTV if you like. Yep, no doubt about it. The hardware engineers who make these cards are pretty darned brilliant.Which makes you wonder way they choose to work with such total nobs when it comes to software. Someone’s got to say it – the video capture software that comes bundled with capture cards is dreck. No, really. Total, complete, garbage. Which is why it’s so important that there’s an application out there like Beyond TV from SnapStream Media.
Retailing for $69.99 for the downloadable Windows version, Beyond TV offers a free programming guide, an easy-to-use interface, and lots of nice extras like the ability to jump past commercials; the ability to find shows based on title, director, actor, or category; it can even play and pause FM radio. The interface couldn’t be simpler or more elegant. And the free programming guide that you use to set-up recordings is seamlessly integrated into the application. No going to some web-based TV Guide abomination like Titan TV, where the indecipherable interface is only slightly less appalling that the painfully slow page loads, the inaccurate channel listings or the microscopic show summaries. (Here’s a tip: If you’re going to buy a TV capture card for your computer, check to see if it only works with Titan TV. If it does, just hire a courtroom sketch artist to record your shows. It’ll be quicker and less painful.)
The folks at SnapStream also offer a radio wireless (no more line-of-sight issues) remote control for $49.99 that works like a charm and can even be used as a wireless mouse. It could be argued that Beyond TV might be the preferred way to record your TV programming over, say, TiVO. Beyond TV has a greater number of criteria for selecting programming, has more settings for recording quality, let’s you control all sorts of nuances like buffer times between recordings, and will work with a wide assortment of capture cards – in the same computer. Our test system sported a dual-tuner analog card and a single HDTV card, but could just as easily had many more tuner cards.
And, of course, when you’re done with your recording, you get an MPEG2 or 4 file sitting in a Windows directory that’s available for other uses.
If you’re hankerin’ for some HD on your PC, you can opt for a bundle that includes DVICO’s Fusion 5 HDTV card and an HD antenna starting at $99.99. The same DVICO card can also display and record cable HD, although that feature is not implemented in Beyond TV.
Geek-o-Meter: We give BeyondTV 4 a “9″. The software’s very simple interface is a dream as is the programming guide that’s available free from SnapStream. And it offers many powerful features not readily available from turnkey systems like TiVO. One point off for not supporting cable HD recording – a feature of the DVICO card – or recording off satellite.
