BTV & BM Intergration

[Peetieatwork]

I think it's great that you can keep the buffer now, but when they decide to intergrate the 2 they deffinetly need to keep the buffer going even after you exit live tv, like tivo and most pvr systems do. Say you're watching live tv and a comercial comes on I have to hit record in order to get to setup recordings, recorded shows or any other feature other than live tv, I don't want to do that, the only way that btv should kill the buffer is if I tell it to or if I shut down btv. When you exit it should ask you would you like to kill the buffer instead of are you sure you want to close.

[draiko4]

The used to do this with BTV 3.0... when 3.4 came out, they removed the "always Timeshift" feature because of the strain it put on harddrives. A harddrive that accesses 24/7 will have a greater chance of failure.

I'd love to see this feature come back, but the power consumption and physical strain of a harddrive running 24/7 is just too much. I'd love for snapstream to bring it back but only for use with the Gigabyte i-RAM Reviewed at Tom's hardware here

or maybe they can find some way to use the larger active buffers on upcoming Hybrid harddrives.

Either that or one could have Beyond TV create a virtual Ramdisk on computers with more than 1 gig of RAM... it's possible with software like RamDisk

I'd love to see this type of innovation come to Beyond TV.

i-RAM is set to retail at $140-$150 and slapping in 4 gigs of DDR400 would set the total solution price to around $400

Hefty price for a 4 gig drive but most people would only need 1 or 2 gigs. I use 2 gigs for my buffer.

[Peetieatwork]

I just want to be able to have that option, sage tv has it and it runs fine but the software sucks. if they could give you the option to kill the buffer whenever you want. I just get annoyed when I'm watching live tv and I have to hit record to exit live tv and keep the buffer going. I want the full media center ablilitys, i recomend snapstream to every person I come in contact with and it would be nice if they could see that it has all of tivo's features and more. Did 3.0 keep the buffer going even after you exit live tv?

[draiko4]

Yes, all the versions up until 3.4 did have always timeshifting. Just understand that a harddrive's mechanics are only built to reliably last up to 5 years (planned obsolecence). The reliable life of the drive decreases if it constantly writes. Snapstream also took out the abilty to define where the timeshifting buffer is stored in 4.0 in order to make the new Retro (Back-capture) feature work.

Windows XP pro supports up to 4 Gigs of Ram. Theoretically, If one had 4 gigs of ram, one could create a 2 or 3 gig ramdrive using a program like RamDisk, set BTV timeshift buffer location to the ramdrive, and tell BTV to copy any backcaptured tv to the New recordings folder, one could have always timeshifting on. It wouldn't work with HDTV because the file sizes would be waaaay too big, but it would give you that always timeshifting feature and improve performance.

The major problem I see is transferring a buffer file from RAM to a harddrive during a back-capture. This would cause skipping. Maybe there's a way to stream the file off of ram to a harddrive during a recording thus avoiding the skipping.

Building TV cards with Ram (much like video cards) seems like a logical step at some point in time.

It'd be an interesting experiment and a somewhat pricey proposition with a 1 GB DIMM of DDR400 costing at least $60. But I can't see how having less than a 1 hour buffer would be feasable for TV watching.

[mlbdude]

Always recording the last station that was viewed is NOT timeshifting. If it was implemented right like in every other PVR it would be great. Just timeshift the current show I am watching or give me the ability to let it timeshift until I tell it to stop.

[Peetieatwork]

Originally Posted by mlbdude

Always recording the last station that was viewed is NOT timeshifting. If it was implemented right like in every other PVR it would be great. Just timeshift the current show I am watching or give me the ability to let it timeshift until I tell it to stop.

that's exactly what i'm saying, tivo runs on a hardrive it's just a linux operating system and they have this feature, and it's on all the time. All i'm asking is to be able to exit live tv go set up a recording watch a recorded show and then go back into live tv and still have my buffer. If I want to kill it it can ask me when I shut down the btv interface because chances are if I'm closing btv I don't want to keep the buffer otherwise I could just minimize it.

[mlbdude]

It would be nice if you can just kill it or it would expire on its onw in the UI. Lots of users use software like that as a dedicated HTPC and never close the UI. Some kind of Stop command would be cool.

[queonda]

I actually have BM, which I never installed or opened because I was promised integration, so I got it.