Customer Reviews

Beyond TV 4

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I read some of these reviews, and the bugs reported I just do not see at all. Bear in mind though that the company submits regular bug fixes and free updates, so these problems reported here may have been fixed already. I am currently on 4.4

I have only had one major problem with the product that had to do with my TV card's IR Blaster, which I cannot truly blame on Beyond TV.

Beyond TV is great and has many features that work great. They list them on their website, but do a comparison with other products carefully. There may be features you can live without in one that are critical to you in the others.

Beyond TV, for example, is sadly missing two features its competitors have, and these are features I would pay for.

1. It does not allow you to set up recordings by theme. That is hard to describe totally, but many products out there have the abililty to let you tell the software to find and record, say, all movies with Woody Allen, no matter when they occur. Beyond TV will find them in their search utility, but makes you program them for recording one by one. Rather lame.

2. A less important missing feature, but a kind of cool one, is the ability to recommend shows based on your likes and dislikes. I don't care much it is missing this feature, but if you want it, there are products that compete well with Beyond TV that have it.

That said, the product is solid. I have had a couple of recordings mess up, but I don't think there is a perfect DVR out there. My old Replay TV had problems along that line on occasion too.

Being able to program your recordings over the internet is cool too. But I think others do this as well. However, Beyond TV checks every half an hour or so and downloads the newly programmed recordings from the snapsteam.net website, so you can remotely program a show within an hour of its start and likely get it recorded just dandy.

One final complaint about the product is it is slow. The interface is very slow, the web interface they use to manage advanced features is painfully slow at times. Maybe a beefier machine would do the trick though. I used an older PIII 500 because I wanted to dedicate it to the task and didn't want to spend a ton of money to make it all play.

If Beyond TV adds the two features above it is best in class or right up there with the best in class. Right now, it is not best in class and I would recommend the competition. It is up to you to do a little research to find out what best prouct is, because I don't think Amazon will let me tell you.

I tried out this program and ended up also trying out Sage and Windows XP Media Center which was installed on my computer.

I started with an AMD dual core desktop computer, 3 MB RAM, an HP 17" monitor and a Pioneer 42" plasma TV as my video displays, 400 GB of hard drive, new Hauppauge HDTV tuners (one a PCI card, HVR 1600 and one a USB dongle, HVR 950) for my computer, and also a Radeon X1300 video card to give me a video output.

Here are my impressions of the three programs:

Beyond TV4 (version 4.6) had little to no useful documentation but was pretty intuitive in the setup. It had my favorite interface for setting up recordings and it has the nicest Guide function. It also seemed to have the most optional and customizable settings but, without a manual, some were hard to find and harder to know what they really did. In the end, I just could not get it to work properly and consistently. At times it worked, at other times it didn't. I ended up getting some messages about rasterizing and other oddities which other users complained about in the Beyond TV forums. I was not happy with how long it took to load the program at each startup of my computer. Also, I was unable to get any closed captioning operational, a critical function for me due to hearing loss. I found its screen sizing function pretty clunky and problematic as I switched between my HP monitor and a 42" plasma TV. Regrettably, it just didn't work for me and I returned the product.

I tried Sage TV on a 15-day free look. It had a wonderful PDF manual (253 pages). It also was deficient in closed captioning ability. It had a very nice screen sizing setup that worked much better than Beyond TV. Its screen was clean and it really looked good. It set up faster then Beyond TV but I had problems getting it to output consistently and properly when I switched between my HP monitor and my plasma TV. It seems to be very comprehensive.

Media Center didn't work for me at all initially, which is why I tried the other two programs. After they frustrated me to death over four days of fooling with settings on video cards, tuner cards and displays, plus downloaded driver and software update issues, I used my new knowledge to search online for Media Center issues. I then discovered (silly me) that HDTV was supported by downloads (rollup versions) which I had not installed or known about in my first attempt to set it up. After the rollup download, Media Center set up easily and operated on both my HP monitor and my plasma TV, switching between them was just a matter of which screen I booted the program into. It also has closed captioning. The Guide is pretty good and everything works beautifully. I still like Beyond TV's interface better but this program is not giving me fits like the other two did, so it gets the overall win in my situation. The biggest plus for me is that Media Center has closed captioning. It is hard to see why the others don't have this function since the captioning is part of the video stream from broadcasters.

Each program has pluses and minuses. My final coice, the Media Center, is based on its closed captioning, apparent stability in displays and its general functionality.

(Note: this is copied from another spot reviewing the same software. I saw that the one guy plastered his comments in several places, so I wanted to voice mine to retort ... but only to 2 spots).

I'm not sure what got into a couple of the previous reviewers, but he inspired me to provide my quite contrasting opinion. I'll note up front that I have no interest in any software's 'DivX' capabilities; I just wanted a Tivo-like device for my room. One that didn't charge $12.95 a month for an online TV schedule. My Tivo was and is wonderful, but I figured I could do better without the monthly overhead.

I purchased an older (used) 1.8 Ghz Dell and a Hauppauge PVR-150 card; the PC already had a TV-out on its video card, so I was all set. Ok, I added a 300Gb drive to it.

I spent considerable time trying EVERYTHING I could find, software-wise. And I mean everything (Windows-based). In the end, I had to choose between BeyondTV and SageTV. I found enough quirkinesses in SageTV that I went with BeyondTV and have never really looked back.

Oh, one more note. In between the Tivo and this machine (I call it my PC-VO! :), I also had purchased an HP Media Center machine. This for my personal use AND to watch and record TV while I worked. This featured a 2002 Media Center setup, and it worked pretty well (TV card is currently broken ... working on a replacement). Except that I had to jump through hoops to convert the resulting .ms-dvr files to MPEG so I could edit them and make DVD's out of them. Creating my own DVD recordings was a primary goal for me, and MediaCenter IS NOT the best source for DVD-recordable media. It can be done and was, but everything else records to ready-to-go MPEG files. Even Tivo.

So, I've been using BeyondTV for some time now (currently at v4.5). There are some things I could see being improved, but for me, it's been nothing but a trooper. I have a Wireless USB network connection and can copy MPEG files to my HP for DVD creation. And the 300gig drive is a great holding place for these recordings until I'm ready for them.

I can't claim to have 42 shows scheduled to record, but I have a decent amount of them, and my list has changed over time. I've never seen a problem maintaining or using this list. It finds the shows I ask it to and records them.

In all, I've very happy with BeyondTV and would recommend it to anyone and everyone. For fun, I've just ordered parts for my first "ground up" build of a HTPC machine, and after I fiddle with Linux and MythTV for awhile, I have a feeling I'll be back to Windows and BeyondTV on this machine, too.

Gripes? Well, perhaps one. Maybe 2. I do see some occassional pokiness in the video and/or sound. Occassional is the key, and I blame this partially on my older machine and ancient video card. I could try beefing these up, but it doesn't bother me enough. The BIGGEST gripe I have may also be machine-centric, but BeyondTV also fails to tell me when there is a problem. Every 3-4 weeks it seems I lose my network connection. Well, BeyondTV doesn't see it and cannot connect to refresh the program guide. Now that I know this happens, I simply check once a week and boot about once a month. Perhaps if I was hard-wired this might not happen, I can't say. For me, booting on occassion isn't such a bad thing.

Bottom line? Beyond TV was an excellent choice for me. They still offer a 21 day free trial, so it's easy to try it for yourself. I have no affiliation at all with SnapStream, I just don't like to see the software I use (successfully) given an unjust bad rap. Please try it for yourself!

It's a shame I can't give a 4.5 rating ... I didn't feel right with 5 stars, but a 4.5 would have been more accurate.

Nick

This program is great! I used to use MsDVR, but due to the lack of product updates and other issues, we started to look at other solutions. With Beyond TV 4, we can access the DVR over the internet from work to add shows at the last minute (my wife is in PR and needs to record clients on news programs during the day). We have used it for the last two weeks to record a large number of programs without any difficulty. After a show is recorded, it is converted to .wmv format and placed on our home network. We can then either watch it on our living room TV or our bedroom TV via our networked computers with TV-out video cards. I can also make the program convert the files to a smaller format so I can watch my shows on my PDA on the train on my way to/from work. The web interface also allows us to download recorded shows while on travel to watch in our hotel room.
We don't take advantage of it, but you can also use multiple TV cards in the same machine to record two different programs at once. If you do this, I recommend buying tv cards that do the encoding on the card to eliminate recording problems. Supposedly, the program can also wake the computer up out of standby, but we haven't used that feature yet.

I have had BTV4 since Jan. 06 and it works great. Very good user interface. Easy to install and maintain. Picture quality is great. I have seen some bad reviews about this product by so called experienced users. I strongly disagree with their reviews. This product has great features and they work out of the box. Setting up recordings remotely is really cool. No monthly subscription fees is even better. With BTVLink I can watch TV on all of my networked computers without installing extra hardware. Firefly remote allows me to control my BTV computer from any room in the house. This is cool stuff!

When it works, it rivals my Replay and Tivo experience. However, that said, it is "buggy". You cannot depend on it functioning as expected. THAT WAS MY ORIGINAL REVIEW! AFTER GOING ROUND & ROUND FOR NEARLY A MONTH, THE PROBLEM WAS SOLVED BY SNAPSTREAM. AM I A HAPPY CAMPER? YES! I still resent that you cannot talk to any support person -- it is all done via email back and forth. You cannot even get the phone answered at their Houston TX office. FIVE STARS WOULD BE MY CURRENT RATING!!! It just took awhile and lots of irritation to get there.

I read several reviews of this software today, and was blown away that anyone could not love it. I guess if you are trying to run it on a machine that isn't with current technology it would be a problem, but my machine is a 3 year old athlon 64 bit with a 20 dollar ati video card in it, and we record multiple HD progams at the same time we are watching another one.

We have the HD homerun for capture and it is amazing as well.

Beyond TV is LEAPS AND BOUNDS beyond windows media center. It is soooooo fast, it has sooooo many options, and it has NEVER crashed since we got it set up properly.

My only complaint is that its 100 dollars. It would nice to be like 50 or somewhere close to that.

Dont hesitate to buy it, but make sure you system meets all the requirements before hand ESPECIALLY if you plan to watch/record HD.

I've been looking for a DVR software supports QAM. This one works great. It did take some time at the beginning to manually identify the QAM channels one by one, but that's not the fault of the software. After setting it up, it requires little effort to schedule recording.

The best things of this software is that it provides tons of flexibility in terms of settings. Other nice features are web configuration interface, integration with iTunes and watch your recorded program on iPod. Also it's integrated with a streaming server, this makes it possible to watch recorded program on a web browser anywhere.

Over all, this beats Windows Media Center hands down.

I've been using beyond tv since version 3.5 and I love it. I've never had any real problems with it and they keep adding great features like being able to make podcasts from TV shows you record (love not having to pay to get TV shows on my ipod/zune) and drive pooling so your management of storage is minimal.

I have found that the beefier the system the better your results will be. I started with a lower end system and everything worked but I missed out on some of the stuff like the transparent overlays and such. But now I have a bigger system (by no means top of the line) and I get all the benefits of the software.

Used to work ok. In retrospect, it's never been worth what they charge for it, but it was ok. It took a long time to load, sometimes would hang up, etc. - I have more than adequate RAM, processing speed, etc. The recent upgrade to 4.81 is however a nightmare. It has kicked off some of the local channels and is causing my whole computer to lock up and has gotten even slower in loading and processing. Until they fix the current release, I would strongly advise against purchase.