Request: Multiple ViewScapes for Multiple Tuners

[Seattlite]

Having been told by another that 'currently' although one may currently have multiple tuners on a system, you can only open one ViewScape on a computer... BTV Link can't even be concurrently installed on a BTV server to accomplish this.

So I'm requesting here that it be considered for future releases of Beyond TV, that multiple instances of ViewScape be able to be brought up, so that not only can you record multiple stations, but view them as well.

(I intentionally left out using future releases of BTV Link to accomplish this, because I would like it innate in Beyond TV... of course allowing Link to do this on remote computers would be "nifty" as well)

[softnerd]

That would be a heck of a strain on your hardware...even with a pretty hefty setup. Maybe by the time we see that feature people will have hardware that could handle it well.

[Seattlite]

Originally Posted by softnerd

That would be a heck of a strain on your hardware...even with a pretty hefty setup. Maybe by the time we see that feature people will have hardware that could handle it well.

I don't agree with your assumption. My desktop (specs in signature) only runs at 15% CPU Utilization when running.... and thats for a SOFTWARE mpeg encoder card. I'm interested to see the numbers when I stick the Hardware mpeg encoder cards in it.

My BTV Link machine is a DELL Latitude C840: 2.4GHz P4, 400MHz FSB, 512MB PC266 RAM, 64MB nVidia. It uses about 30% CPU Utilization.

Now I don't consider my hardware to be either out of the ordinary for computing uses, nor do I consider my hardware to be current any longer.... but I do think capable of running a couple ViewScapes. Not that I want to sit on my butt and watch 3 programs all the time. But occasionally it might be nice to have a couple channels up at the same time instead of flipping back and forth when there are 2 things i'm interested in (news/sports).

I mean if my computer is recording 6 shows at the same time, then watching 2 shows at the same time, isn't that much more difficult. I mean look at the computing needs with BTV's current ability for multiple simultaneous recordings.... all that data streaming across the bus, and the harddrive demands.

[Peetieatwork]

They should do a window in a window like on some tv's with duel tuners

[NorthernYankee]

Yeah I would love to see Picture-in-Picture in a future release.

--NY

[KingRandom]

I would also love Picture in Picture or Picture out of Picture (side-by-side) or best yet, dual ViewScapes.

I just wanted to add my vote.

~KingRandom

[neilcb]

I just want to second/third/fourth the statement that it would be awesome if BTV could allow you to do some form of picture in picture so that you can have two videos displayed at the same time.

If this was an issue of hardware abilty, i bet a large number of people would upgrade their machines to have this sort of capability. If, in the future, this sort of capability shows up on a competing HTPC system, i would definitely consider switching. However, BTV has made me very happy thus far.

[merrypig]

Plus with dual core, hyperthreading processors, there's no reason why you couldn't decode 4 streams simultaneously... and as pointed out, with one stream taking only 15-20% - a modern pc could easily do 8 (with some nice disk thrashing

[PaulF]

Originally Posted by Seattlite

Having been told by another that 'currently' although one may currently have multiple tuners on a system, you can only open one ViewScape on a computer... BTV Link can't even be concurrently installed on a BTV server to accomplish this.

So I'm requesting here that it be considered for future releases of Beyond TV, that multiple instances of ViewScape be able to be brought up, so that not only can you record multiple stations, but view them as well.

(I intentionally left out using future releases of BTV Link to accomplish this, because I would like it innate in Beyond TV... of course allowing Link to do this on remote computers would be "nifty" as well)

I assumed BTV would have this feature when I bought it. I mean it is a Windows program and Windows is designed to have multi-tasking multi-windows applications. I was very disappointed when it turned out to be a fancy DOS program. There should two windows minimum. One for picture only and one for user input. Like all of DVD players I have seen. A video window for each tuner was what I was expecting. BTV had many features I wasn't expecting so I am reasonably happy, though.

[guncam_man]

I mean if my computer is recording 6 shows at the same time, then watching 2 shows at the same time, isn't that much more difficult.

Actually, it is more difficult. (or can be, depending on the hardware)

With encoding hardware, recording only needs to move an mpeg stream to disk - not hard.

Decoding means taking that stream from disk (not hard), decoding it (getting harder) and streaming the large decoded stream across busses (getting even harder).