Home
 

Beyond TV: PVR software for your PC TV tuner card, Buid your own media center


      
 

(<< Return to Beyond TV Homepage)

HDTV Setup Center

Once you have Beyond TV 4, you can add HDTV functionality at any time—during or after your initial setup. Setting up your HDTV DVR is a little bit of extra work. But once you’ve experienced the sharpness of a high-definition picture and the intensity of Dolby Digital sound, we’re sure that you’ll be a true HD convert!

There are three ways to get HDTV in Beyond TV:

Over-the-air (OTA) HDTV Setup Center (recommended)- With an HDTV antenna and any standard ATSC TV Tuner card, you can record free HDTV in Beyond TV. This is the simplest and most common method of recording HDTV in Beyond TV.
Clear QAM HDTV Setup Center - With a cable TV connection (no set-top box required!) and an HDHomeRun network tuner, you can record free HDTV in Beyond TV. More complicated to setup than over-the-air HDTV, using clear QAM eliminates the need for an antenna.

Newest to the HD recording family is the Hauppauge HD PVR. This is the first video recorder that allows you to capture component output from your cable or satellite box in HD.*

 

 

 

 

 

* Beyond TV 4.9.0 introduces "beta" level support for the Hauppauge HD PVR. At release time, we are still experiencing issues with the device and playback of its files that prevent us from fully supporting it. The issues fall in three major categories:

1. Hardware reliability: Over weeks of testing, in-house data suggests the Hauppauge HD PVR hardware randomly will stall and require a reset. We are providing data to Hauppauge to assist with identifying and fixing the problem.

2. Video Playback: The Transport Stream h.264 video output by the Hauppauge HD PVR is a new file type that not all decoders correctly support. There are issues with seeking (like fast forward and skipping), resolution switching and channel changing. We suggest trying both the included SnapStream h.264 Video Decoder along with the ArcSoft decoder from Total Media Extreme, which is included on Hauppauge HD PVR device driver CD.

3. Video Post Processing: ShowSqueeze and SmartChapters will not run automatically against Hauppauge HD PVR created files in 4.9. Testing shows these files will almost certainly hang while processing. You may execute jobs manually through the Viewscape and Web admin. The SnapStream Knowledge base has an article that will allow you to turn automatic processing back on.