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.
Continue Reading…

Faucet PVR is a new web based personal video recorder (PVR) which allows the recording of mainstream Italian network channels.

These can then be easily downloaded to your Apple iPod or iPhone, and be instantly accessible.

This unique service is in beta testing at the moment, and is at a purely experimental stage of development with no commercial ambitions. But it provides a truly useful, easy to use product in an area where rules and laws have left an open gap in the market up to now.

Born out of the engineering and product development team of Inrete, an Italian company devoted to help and support large enterprise customers in their IT network needs, Faucet PVR is a web-based personal video recorder that can capture any time range on the all the major on-air clear broadcast channels available in Italy.

A Virtually Unique Service

There seems to be no similar service yet in the international market as competing tools are either scheduling software front-ends for video-television recording software or web-based versions of TiVo-like personal video recording systems. 

All competing or similar systems I have been able to find online require a direct TV reception capability in your computer either via set-top box, tuner card or other device, while Faucet records any television program even if you are lost on an island with no reception.

In the case of Faucet PVR, the recordings are all done and reside on the Faucet servers and each user can access and download what she has selected to video record. 

Faucet does NOT record indiscriminately all of the on-air programming takes place but it rather provides an interface to a web-based digital video recorder that each individual can use to record his preferred television shows.

The recordings are then made available for a limited amount of time in the user account and can be easily downloaded to an iPod or any other portable media player including mobile phones and PDAs.

Here are more details:

BeyondTV is my favourite Home Theater PC Software. Using the built in BeyondTV web admin interface, you can edit any of the show details including title, and description.

If you are just editing one shows information this is more then sufficient for the task. But if you are needing to edit multiple files at a time, you need a way to edit all of those fields quickly, cut and paste functions and a quick save of all edits. The perfect tool for this task is BTVShowInfo.

BTVShowInfo is a freeware application developed by John Maver - a member of the Snapstream Forums that allows you to edit any text and date information stored inside the video files recorded on BeyondTV.

Podcatcher is a free plugin developed by Michael Pyle, which works with Beyond TV to enable you to watch video podcasts on your Home Theater PC.

Using Podcatcher, you can set the program to download video podcasts automatically, integrating the podcast title and information straight in to the Beyond TV folders with ease.

Limitations:

• Must Own Beyond TV4 or higher
• Will only Allow playback of BeyondTV supported files such as: