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 1280×720p 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.

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