Saturday, September 01, 2007

BeyondTV 4.7 Public Beta Released


Snapstream officially announced the latest public beta of Beyond TV 4.7.1 last night.

There are several improvements and some very nice new features for this latest version of BeyondTV including:

  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. 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 1280x720p 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).

  3. 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.

  4. 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)

  5. iPhone or Smartphone Remote Control your BeyondTV - Snapstream is calling this feature the firefly nano (named after their firefly HTPC remote). I have more detail on the Firefly nano feature in this post.

  6. 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.

  7. Multiple usb-uirt support - use and manage multiple USB-UIRT's with one Beyond TV machine.

  8. 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.

  9. You can now set "record at this timeslot" to set up a show to record only at a certain time slot.

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 when it goes public. If you can't wait and would like to help do the final beta testing, you can join the beta testing group here.

No integration of Beyond Media features with this one, but here's hoping it is released with the 5.0 version that must be coming before to awful long.

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