SnapStream is not the most unstable app I have used. The statement is only meant when in comparison to SageTV which will always be more stable because of its lower level architecture. Overall I think SS is a good app.
BTW, I think SS support is great and they are constantly evolving to handle user concerns. Here is a quote from a SS team member(maybe THE team member) which outlines what they are currently doing to address the stability concerns.
Quote:
Well, where to start first? First of all, SnapStream has a larger and less technical base of users. Part of our job is educating the market about PVS and HTPC's and I'm sure you can imagine the downsides as well as the upsides to this. We've chosen to do this, so we're not complaining.
Second. We try to do more. We support software encoding. We ask the user to have up-to-date drivers with a decent video card that isn't going to crash when running our Direct3D UI 24/7. Unfortunately adding more pieces to the puzzle adds more things that can go wrong. When a customer's hardware isn't up to the task of running fullbore day in and day out or when one of those extra pieces doesn't interact well with the other pieces, we get blamed. Leaving your computer on 24/7 doing nothing and leaving it on doing video encoding and decoding pushing massive amounts of data across the bus are two entirely different things. Hardware encoders often mask the issues here from customers.
Third, we've moved to requiring the .NET framework. It's an extra download but our testers have indicate that they're OK with it if it means faster and more stable development from us (which it does). I'm very jazzed that our customers have given us the go-ahead to do this.
Fourth, we've been cleaning up parts of the architecture to operate more cleanly. This is a guts level type of thing.
Fifth and finally, as part of the rearchitecture we've been separating the actual foundation of PVS into multiple separate processes. Even if one section of PVS goes down now, it can't take down the rest of the application. Basically it's simply impossible to propagate crashes from one component of the app to the rest of it.. We're already seeing big payoffs from this.
As you can see, we take stability very seriously and are and have been making significant strides in this area in direct response to our customerst.
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Excellent response in my opinion.