[cat6man]

Well, here is what I would like to see from Snapstream in the future. I assume
we should be seeing things like this on the market by 3Q or 4Q 2005.

CRITICAL: (show stoppers)
1. HDTV support is critical. MACs can already record firewire from cable boxes in the US.
We need drivers and s/w to make that possible with BTV on Windows 2k and XP. If an
intermediary box is needed (to convert firewire TS format from the cable vox to MP2 for example) that's fine and might even be beneficial to keep cycles off the CPU for liveTV
(and avoid real time transcoding).

2. Rock solid stability of an integrated player such as MediaMVP. This absolutely
must be rock solid as the current ethernet link for that hardware (with and without
the BTV interface) is not ready for prime time. If the competition is integrated
boxes like Tivo, the BTV solution must network as solidly as a single box solution.
Apparently 10mbps-half duplex is by the mediaMVP which doesn't play nicely with
all routers and ethernet devices. The connect time for me is between 2 and 3 minutes
for a mediaMVP using the BTV interface, way way way too long. Periodic disconnects
make the problem even worse (seems to happen more with liveTV than playing
back already recorded shows....also seems to be sensitive to hitting buttoms too
quickly).

3. Media player must have digital output capability (HDMI) in addition to component
output to the TV. I know there are messy issues with flags, etc but this needs to be
worked out properly.

4. 100baseT (or gigE) ethernet connectivity allowing much higher transfer rates
than the current mediaMVP

5. (added 4/19) LiveTV should have a different record quality setting
so that I can watch/stream live TV with the highest possible video quality.
We need to be able to distinguish between quality for recordings (which
use space/memory) and live TV which only uses the existing buffers
and should be settable to as high a resolution as we want. I can see
the degradation of DVD quality recording of NTSC and going to higher
quality is visible even on my NTSC set....with a high def set in the future,
motion artifacts will be even more noticeable.

Those are my critical must-have features.

In addition,

NICE TO HAVE:
1. better support for internet radio.....i'd like to be able to log on to
MLB Gameday Audio, which requires selecting a game and logging in
before the audio player is launched.....i'd like a way to do this in an
enhanced 'internet radio' functionality....perhaps launchig a script
on the PC that automates the process?

2. picture in picture for multi-tuner setups