Beyond TV is Snapstream MEDIA’s own Tivo type program for the PC. One advantage of Beyond TV over Tivo however, is their free Program Guide. It’s great! I also bought the Firefly Remote, recommended by Snapstream.

There are many features to Beyond TV: Smartskip, which allows you to skip over commercials, or any other part of a show (in case you only got to watch the half of it); Free program guide, which allows you to view upcoming shows and schedule to record; Showsqueeze, which compresses your recordings down to a WMV file.

I bought the Hauppag encoder card bundle with Beyond TV. The system requirements were not too steep, however, I knew that my ATI 9000 All In Wonder wasn’t going to be able to handle it all. So I decided that I will use the Hauppag card to get the cable feed, and use the ATI to output it to TV. This turned out to be a great idea. I’d recommend it to anyone, honestly, unless you have a system that can perform and lots of memory as well.

I’m running my PVR (Personal video recorder) on a Pentium-III 886MHz machine, with 512MB of RAM. I’m recording my shows on a Western Digital 45gig Hard drive, 7200RPM. So far, I’ve had no issues with speed, although I attribute that to the fact that I have a dedicated video card for both input and output. They recommend a Pentium 4 without a hardware encoder card (like my hauppag), but it looks good for mine so far.

Installation was a snap. Though it seemed to take a while for it to start, I believe that had something to do with my system and all the applications I’m running on it. This system is also my music jukebox as well. After installation, I managed to download my program guide, and test to be sure all my cable channels were correct. You will have to sign up for a Snapstream account, but this is painless.

The Firefly remote was just as easy to install. I noticed that it does not use Infrared, which in many ways is a bonus. I don’t have to worry about line of sight, which for me is always a good thing. After installing the firefly software, I plugged in the USB receiver and voila, it was done. The firefly remote also has custom buttons. You can program these to what you like, though I have not set this up, as I have not found quite the need for it yet. The remote has plenty of buttons to work, and they do a great job.

Once inside Beyond TV, setting things up is a snap. You can directly view the program guide, find a program you wish to record, and set it to “record this show”, “record all shows”, or “record all NEW shows”. I like the record new shows. This makes it so that I am not wasting space recording reruns that I most likely have already seen many times.

You can also view Live TV within Beyond TV, and it works much like a few satellite systems I’ve seen. You can browse through the channels, each giving you the name of the show and a synopsis (if any). Very nice feature.

You can schedule shows to be recorded from the Snapstream online guide. These are considered “remote recordings”, but function exactly the same as if you were at your computer at home. Because all you need to do is login with your username and password, this makes it incredibly easy to set up recordings. If you were at another location and realized you wanted to record a show, you can easily jump online to the Snapstream online guide and set your PVR to record it. Beyond TV on your pc checks to see if there are any remote recordings and fetches for you on a regular basis. I love this feature.

While watching your recordings, there is the skip feature. This will skip over commercials, or skip to the next part of the “stop” as labeled by Beyond TV. This is a great feature. Another great thing of course, is that you can fast forward or rewind in 3 speeds, watching the progress of the show. Again, another nice feature.

Showsqueeze is also a good feature. A typical 1 hour show will take up approximately 2gigs uncompressed as an MPG file. Obviously this could easily take up major space. With Showsqueeze, these files can be reduced to about 700meg per 1 hour show. You can configure Beyond TV so that once showsqueeze is completed, it will delete the original file. On my system, all MPG’s are “squeezed” to a WMV file. This makes it easy to stream across your network.

All in all, though I haven’t touched on all points, these are the major things I was looking for. If had to give Beyond TV a rating, I would have to say 4.5 out of 5 stars. There is only one negative I have to comment on, however. The Showsqueeze seems to be a little slow. I realize it does help to have a faster system, but this is just one thing I thought could be a little faster. I just may be a bit ignorant of video compression, however. I’ve seen 1 show take as long as 6 hours. This to me is a little too long, even for my own system. Of course, this could be the way they intended. Regardless, great product, and I’d recommend it to anyone wanting to build their own PVR.

Overall Rating: 4.5/5 stars

Pros: Easy to install, Easy to use. Free online guide.

Cons: Showsqueeze seems a bit slow to compress files.