Playing more with BeyondTV

A while ago the people at Snapstream Media were kind enough to provide me with a copy of BeyondTV for my home-built media center.

Anyone who has been over to my apartment or knows me well is aware that this little box of electronics has taken up an inordinate amount of my time over the past couple of months as I am continually trying to tweak it to work better.

Because I built the entire system myself, and use components from all over the place (Windows MCE Remote, BeyondTV, Hauppauge Cards, etc), there are still a few kinks to iron out of the deal.

The largest hurdle I’ve faced with the setup is getting it to work smoothly with my satellite set-top box. Only Windows MCE interacts smoothly with the MCE Remote (duh) to blast to set-top boxes. Using BTV (or Sage, if you run it instead) is tricky, and solutions are sort of hacked together with programs like HIPSend and exeTuner.

Despite the hassle, however, I have to say that BeyondTV has been a great application so far. I actually bought SageTV first, because it is a more complete “media center” package, but an unending stream of errors with HDTV playback, DIVX crashes, and poor support led me to jump at the chance to try BeyondTV.

Aside from the fact that the BTV interface is less “media center” like, and it has less of a community of modding the interface, the program itself is great. My only real complaint is that the real meat of the program settings have to be accessed through a web browser, and not by remote.

At the moment I’m trying to get the built-in ShowSqueeze app (a really *really* cool included feature) to automatically compress my recorded TV overnight. It shouldn’t be that hard to set up.