MaximumPC 2006 10

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6 CONFIGURE BEYOND TV

You won’t realize how powerful Beyond TV

is until you confi gure it to suit your enter-

tainment needs. After you’ve spent a few

minutes in this section, you’ll understand

why we’ve recommended this software even

though just about every TV tuner on the

market ships with PVR software of its own.

The majority of Beyond TV’s settings

deal with the infrastructure of your PVR sys-

tem and are accessed by right-clicking the

Beyond TV icon in the taskbar and choosing

Advanced Settings from the pop-up menu.

This opens a confi guration menu in your

web browser, which has two options: Basic

Settings and Advanced Settings. (Don’t

worry, the confusion spawned by clicking

Advanced Settings in order to access Basic

Settings doesn’t last long.)

You’ll fi nd that you’ve already made

many of these decisions during the instal-

lation routine—the directory where you’ll

store recorded TV shows, for instance—and

the default values for most parameters

will work. However, the software gives you

immense fl exibility to tweak its behavior,

which makes our PC-based PVR superior

to any stand-alone device that performs the

same function.

The only Basic settings you’ll likely want

to fool with are Snapstream.net Settings and

ShowSqueeze. Snapstream has big expan-

sion plans for its online service; but for now, it

enables you to schedule TV recordings over

the Internet or with your cellphone, browse TV

listings online, and receive email alerts about

your favorite shows. If you didn’t sign up for

a Snapstream.net account during installation,

you can sign up for it here. If you did, one of

the most important settings here is the priority

assigned to remote recordings. The remote-

recording commands you schedule over the

Internet are prioritized differently than the

recordings you manually set up, and could

preempt another, more important recording. If

you assign a low priority to the shows sched-

uled via remote recording, they’ll never over-

write anything (but the trade-off is that they

might not be recorded in the fi rst place).

ShowSqueeze will automatically com-

press recordings to conserve storage space.

Beyond TV turns off this feature by default; if

you turn it on, you can control whether it con-

verts MPEG-2 fi les to either Windows Media

or Divx format after the recording is done. You

can also confi gure the app to automatically

delete the source fi le after it’s converted.

DRILLING A LITTLE

DEEPER

The Advanced settings are much more inter-

esting. On the Video Qualities screen you

can tweak the values (including audio and

video bit rate and dimensions) for almost

40 MPEG-2, Windows Media, and Divx

confi gurations. You can even create entirely

new profi les. If you’re interested in stream-

ing video over your own network or over the

Internet, Streamer Server Settings enables

you to modify the default values of Beyond

TV’s built-in streaming server.

Yet another Settings menu is contained

within Beyond TV’s 10-foot interface (known

as ViewScape), and it’s largely a subset of the

other two. To get there, launch the

program and click the Settings menu.

This will take you to a screen with

fi ve submenus: Recording, Playback,

ShowSqueeze and SmartSkip,

SnapStream.Net, and General.

In Recording Settings, you

can choose the recording format

(MPEG-2 is the default), record-

ing quality (including two grades

of “DVD-ready”), and the number

of minutes of padding (additional

minutes before and after a sched-

uled recording) that will be recorded

in case a program starts or ends

before or after its published sched-

ule. We recommend you record

using the MPEG-2 format, as that’s

the only way you can pause, rewind,

and fast-forward live TV.

If you have a DirectX 9 video-

card, we recommend you confi gure

Playback Settings to use the 3D-accelerated

video renderer. Then Beyond TV will super-

impose transparent dialog boxes over the

video instead of the default overlay, which

obscures the underlying video. You should

also enable hardware deinterlacing for best

picture quality. If you’re watching TV on

a widescreen display and the video looks

either stretched or compressed, enable non-

square pixel compensation.

For the ShowSqueeze and SmartSkip

settings, we recommend you leave

Automatic ShowSqueeze and its related fea-

tures at their default values (unless you have

very limited hard-drive capacity). Enabling

SmartSkip will make it easier to skip mul-

tiple commercials with a single click; but

SmartSkip only runs after the recording is

complete. If your HTPC will be running 24/7,

choose the “generate during off peak times”

option, so it won’t interfere with other uses

you might have for the machine.

We’ve really only scratched the surface

of Beyond TV’s customizability here. We

encourage you to explore all three settings

menus after you’ve mastered the more

common aspects of the program.

Navigate to Beyond TV’s Video Qualities screen,

and you’ll be able to tweak almost every aspect of

40 different video-recording formats.

HOME THEATER PC HOME HOME THEATER PC HOME HOME THEATER PC HOME HOME THEATER PC

You’ll find a raft of power settings in

Beyond TV’s Web Admin configuration tool.

Turn on Beyond TV’s ShowSqueeze

feature and it will automatically convert

shows recorded in MPEG-2 to Windows

Media or Divx formats, both of which

sport higher compression ratios.

MAXIMUMPC OCTOBER 2006