Any Beyond TV fans?

I used to use Beyond and now I use Sage.

I prefer the layout of Beyond, but Sage does more of the things I want. Anyway, why would Beyond work better than Sage with regards to Wifi? I don't see how it would make any difference.

fwiw, I use Sage Client via 54g wireless without any dropouts.

-Suntan

I bought Beyond TV and Beyond Media and really enjoy them (TV more than Media). The problems I have with Media are that it does not show .ts files, and neither does TV...I can rename them to .tp and TV shows them, but doesn't always play them. But for basic DVR functionality, it's great!

Anyone have a good setup with Beyond and HD-OTA? I setup a box for HD-OTA playing/recording. I currently have a standard TV and having the graphic card output s-video. The reason I'm doing HD-OTA is I love the static free picture. I'm currently getting some image stutter and I'm trying to figure out if it is the latest version of the software (version 4.5) or that I need a more powerful graphics card (currently a nvidia GeForce 6200).

I use BeyondTV 4.5 with HD OTA.

You should visit snapstream forum to get more help. But I can tell BeyondTV + HD is pretty good.

There's no reason that it should. When watching live, BeyondTV will be writing to disk to buffer the show, then reading from disk and decoding what it reads from disk. When watching a previously made recording, BeyondTV will be reading from disk and decoding what it reads from disk. So if anything watching live should be slightly more work for the system.

I've started using BeyondTV to handle recording duties for most of my OTA HD shows. I've written a plug-in that creates accessDTV metadata files so I can use accessDTV for playback (the hardware decoding on the accessDTV card is still better than any software decoding I've seen and it saves me from buying a 2nd copy of BeyondTV or BTV Link). Once I'm done getting any kinks out of the plug-in, I'll make it available for others to use.

My BeyondTV system has 6 HD tuners - 3 Hauppauge 950's, 1 Hauppauge 1600, 1 ATI HDTV Wonder, and 1 ATI TV Wonder 650. I can have all 6 tuners recording at the same time (even to the same hard drive) and still be under 50% CPU use. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with BeyondTV.

I also gave SageTV a shot. Among other things, it wouldn't record an unmolested transport stream, which made it impossible to use accessDTV for playback.

SageTV has a lot of features, but just isn't as polished as BeyondTV IMO. Each prospective user would be best served by trying each product out and making their own decision - each has a free trial download available.

The nVidia 6200 is a AGP 8x card. I JUST bought it, so I would prefer to return it and buy a more powerful card before going down the OC road. I have looked at the Snapstream forum, but there is almost too much information there.

Does anyone have a AGP 8x card they can recommend? I was thinking about getting the nVidia GeForce 6600 GT to try next. I'm very encouraged by your comments that I am almost on a working solution. Then the next project will be quieting the PC.

I'm a big BeyondTV fan. However, I'd like to upgrade to Vista Home Premium which is not supported by SnapStream. Is anyone running a DVR program under Vista? What options are available. TIA.

TheOx

I am using BTV and am overall very happy with it.

Everything else looks crappy in comparison. While I like to tweak quite a bit, sage looks and feels unfinished to me.... it just wasnt something I could use everyday. BTV may lack some features, but its got the look and feel that I prefer.

BTV 4.6 should be out any day now... it is vista compatible.

I'm also curious why you want to move to Vista.

BT

Have you guys tried GB-PVR? I've tried out Sage and BTV and was very disapointed overall with both products.

While I was deciding between Beyond TV and SageTV, I took a quick look at the GB-PVR web site and saw nothing to lure me to try it out. The list of supported tuners seemed very short, especially for HD tuners.

I was very disappointed with Sage

Beyond TV 4.5 with two Kworld ATSC cards. Only recently bought the new Kworld card after having the old one for over a year. I love the setup. The one thing that I hate is for some reason after the upgrade from 3.? to 4+, I can only view recorded shows on whichever monitor is set as the main. I have dual monitors and Im used to moving the window from one screen to the other.

This is not true. I can watch BTV in both primary and secondary monitor.

Anyone seen any reviews where they compared BTV, Sage, Myth, MCE, etc etc? I can't seem to find anything.

I would love to see why someone chose one over the other.

TREVOR

I'd say you're somewhat unlikely to come across a full review that compares them, especially more than a couple. For BTV and SageTV, you can download trial versions and try them both out for a week or 2 and form your own opinion. Why I chose BeyondTV over SageTV may be completely irrelevant to your needs.

Myth is only an option if you're willing to have a Linux box, which is a pretty big consideration for most people. It is free though, so there's certainly nothing to stop you from giving it a shot other than the effort involved in getting a Linux system up and running - not overly difficult but may be intimidating if you've never used it before.

MCE works and is a freebie if you buy Windows MCE and is certainly nicely integrated into the OS, but is probably the least capable of the options.

The choice of BTV and SageTV really boils down to personal preference. Each does things the other doesn't and does some of the common things differently.

I have been using BTV for about 2 months and it is trouble free once I got it to work. It has good tolerance on weak TV signals as well as weak wifi connection. My wifi connection is on and off but BTV has not missed any EPG yet. I have a weak channel of NBC and BTV gets the audio if video is bad. In the worst case it just skips a few seconds and in a rare case it skips tens of minutes but it seems to be resilient and get as much as possible out of the weak signal. Weak signal handling is mainly a tuner issue but the BTV software's reaction to it is very good, it just keeps trying until show is over.

I had video stuttering first on 1080i signals but Nvidia's 84.21 driver fixed it on my Geforce 7300LE card. 84.21 seems to be liked my many people and the latest drivers may have other new feature but may not be the best for HDTV playback.

I am very pleased with Beyond TV, I downloaded the 21 day trial version last week and it worked superbly from the get go.

I have a ATI HDTV Wonder card that has had many issues over the last year with the crappy ATI drivers etc., and the Beyond TV interface and audio video performance have been outstanding.

The TIVO like interface makes it super easy to record and playback and to store my shows.

I will be purchasing the full version today they are throwing in the Firefly PC remote a $49.00 value for free with the purchase, that coupled with the $15.00 off $30.00 deal that Paypal is running the software and remote can be had for less than $60.00.

My wife can use BTV with a harmony remote, and never has to ask for help. I'm never changing.

I'm using BTV for recording television, along with MediaPortal for weather, watching DVDs and stored movies. They are working well together....at least for me.

Not for me, I used to be able too.. I even found info on it on the snapstream forums. What version you got? I think they said if you have other codecs it works. But Im used to using either the snapstream codec or the nero one.

If you're sending the compressed stream BTV would be better out of the box because it's encoding profiles out of the box are at lower bitrates. This, obviously, can be changed with either product however... so....

I used MythTV on Linux for a year, switched to to SageTV for a little over a year, switched to Beyond TV for a little under a year, and am about to switch back to SageTV.

The reason I moved from MythTV is because I was tired of constantly upgrading and tweaking the system. It worked fine for what I wanted, but took too much hand-holding. So, I started looking for other alternatives.

SageTV did what I wanted using some customizations. I'd post the link to the document that describes my last SageTV setup, but it won't let me. If you Google buildHTPC.pdf you'll find it. My problem with SageTV is it was flaky for me especially with OTA.

I really like Beyond TV as far as its stability, but it is just for watching TV. I use the HTPC for TV, DVD viewing, Picture viewing, Internet radio, and Internet video. I tried Beyond Media as well as Media Portal to try and fill the gaps, but I just couldn't get the seamless experience that I wanted.

So, now I'm going to give SageTV another go with SageMC and the Slim Player plug-in for Internet radio. I would like to get the LAUNCHcast radio channels as I have a subscription to that, but the only "10 foot" interface I could find for that was Yahoo!s beta HTPC software and MCE.

I probably would like MCE, but I refuse to buy it without being able to give it a good test drive. It seems to have the seamless interface that I want. I wish you could get a 15 or 30 day trial.

For just TV viewing and recording, Beyond TV is great. I have a Hauppauge 500 and an AverMedia A180 as inputs and have no problems with playback on my 1080p panel. For a solution that does more than just TV, I like SageTV. I just hope they have some of the stability issues worked out.

I WAS a fan of BeyondTV until today. For some reason the OTA-HD is not working anymore. I am using an ATI HDTV Wonder card and the analog cable signal works perfectly, but when I go to scan for the OTA-HD channels BeyondTV just sits there and doesn't pick up any channels. I know it is not my card or my antenna because the channels are crystal clear using WatchHDTV.

This is really pissing me off because I had everything setup perfectly two days ago and the HD was working great. Today I get nothing though. I have uninstalled and reinstalled and still I got the same problems.

SageTV in my opinion is garbage. It is way too slow and hangs up almost everytime I tried it out. Unless they seriously improve on the stability of SageTV I would stay away from it!!!