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BeyondTV turns your PC into a DVR
January 27, 2009, 12:36 AM by ROB
Posted in MEDIA, SOFTWARE, REVIEWS | 1050 views
TiVo users, listen up. SnapStream Media's BeyondTV can turn your PC into a powerful Personal Video Recorder (PVR) option that rivals set-top DVR boxes.
BeyondTV comes in two principle options: with or without a bundled TV tuner card. Our review copies shipped with Happauge tuners—we've used the software with both the internal PCI tuner cards and the external USB units and experienced very little difficulty getting things up and running.
After a quick setup wizard and a program guide update to import channel information, , I was greeted with a clean, easy-to-use interface. One click was all it took to start browsing my program guide, set shows to record, and watch my favorite programs.
Being the multi-media junkie that I am, I wanted to push the bar even further. My desktop PC is chock full of hard disk space—1.5 TB, to be specific—including not only my BeyondTV recordings, but my recorded videos of CounterStrike pwnage and short films I've produced. My mobile PCs (a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook and a ThinkPad X60 Tablet) have a good amount of hard disk space, but if my data is already in one place, why duplicate that data across machines? Good thing BeyondTV ships with BeyondTV Link, a remote-access software that can access your BeyondTV installation from the nether-regions of the interwebs. BeyondTV Link provides you with a full-featured BeyondTV installation without the need for a tuner—all of the files are hosted on your PC back home. You can even specify additional folders to add to BeyondTV's folder "pool" and stream your own TV shows and other video media content.
There are other products out there (like MythTV and SageTV) that can offer some of the same functionality at a lower cost ($79.95 for SageTV without a "link" client) or even free (MythTV), but BeyondTV is hard to beat. BeyondTV will set you back $99, but SnapStream offers a 21-day free trial to try out the software. If you're anything like me, you'll love it.
Our rating: 5/5
SnapStream Media
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