Feature Requests: Organize by Category and Better Deleting

[btv02472]

I had ReplayTV until my drive died earlier this year. I did a bit of quite a bit of research and BeyondTV sounded like a possible replacement.

I have a RCN cable service with a set top box and standard television. I got a Dell Dimension 8400 (P4 3.0GHz) from craigslist and added a Happauge WinTV-PVR-500, 2GB of memory and 250GB SATA drive. From this, I have Windows XP. I loved my ReplayTV but I really liked the idea that I could get BeyondTV on a computer and do other things like read email, play the occasional game.

BeyondTV works well. Great picture, easy set up. Great program guide. Good features during playback.

I'm somewhat technical. I’m thrilled that I got the hardware set up and BeyondTV install was a snap. But I really don't want a HTPC setup that requires a lot of regular maintenance outside of BeyondTV. The main driver here is that this is a ReplayTV replacement. My whole family has to be able to use it.

I have a few of problems that really limit my enjoyment of BeyondTV and my family’s ability to use it everyday. I would really appreciate if someone could address the following:

Major Feature Request #1: Organize by Category
I want to be able to organize my recordings (and scheduled recordings) from within BeyondTV by category. As a start, I would like to make use of the categories available in the “Browse By Category” feature for scheduling a recording. But ultimately, I’d like to have my own categories like “Kids”, “Home”, “SciFi”, “News”.

The View by Folders feature just doesn’t work for me. Firstly, I can’t create folders or move recordings within BTV. Second, the file names reflect the name of the program recorded and not any category that would use. I want to be able to schedule recordings and organize my recordings by category in advance rather than create folders and move files around afterward.

I can’t tell you what a huge adoption problem this is. My ever-so-patient partner was trying out BeyondTV. I already have hours of shows recorded that he watches that I never watch. So how’s he using it? He’s watching LIVE TV through BeyondTV. When I asked him why, he tells me that he can’t find what he wants. Everything recorded is just sorted alphabetically. It’s easier to use the guide to find something on now than to hunt through the swamp of recorded shows. I can’t blame him and I might as well hook the cable box right into the TV if that’s the only way he’ll use BeyondTV.

Major Feature Request #2: Delete by Priority
I submitted a question a little while ago asking about how BeyondTV chooses to delete a show to make room for a new recording. I love the ability in BeyondTV to manage recording conflicts. I have shows like “Dirty Jobs” at the bottom and limited to 6 because they always on the schedule and we don’t need every episode. And I have the Fall line up of new shows at the top because I want every episode.

After a few weeks, I was very surprised to see that some of my new show recordings disappeared while low priority shows were still around. Limiting a recording to 6 shows will delete the oldest show to record the newest show. That’s works well, but that means that all the shows are marked as relatively new. When BeyondTV needs disk space for any other programs, it deletes the oldest shows that aren’t marked to “Keep until I delete.”

I should have marked them as “Keep Until I Delete”, but I didn’t expect them to disappear so fast. So now I’m marking everything that way which means I have to manually find things to delete. With ReplayTV, I never seemed to notice this happening.

I would like to see BeyondTV use the same priority scheme to delete shows that it uses to record shows as follows:
1. Delete by lowest priority, viewed, oldest shows.
2. Delete by lowest priority, new (unviewed) shows, oldest.

Major Feature Request #3: Highlight Shows Scheduled To Delete

This is really an offshoot of the previous request and a feature of ReplayTV. I want to know what’s going to disappear in advance. The sooner I know, the sooner I can choose other shows manually, or mark the show as “Save until I Delete”.

I have other ideas, but these are the ones that really give me pause. I’ve searched through the forums and I’m surprised that there hasn’t been much discussion around these ideas. I thought I might be misunderstanding how BeyondTV works or not finding the right feature to get what I need.

Sorry to go on so long. Is there a chance that BeyondTV development will be able to incorporate any of these features anytime soon or is this a pipe dream? I see so much activity around HD/iPhone/DVD and that’s great, but none of that is interesting to me. I just need a robust, streamlined feature set around managing what BeyondTV already does well.

Dominick

[tscales]

I agree the delete features would be nice. I just kept adding hard disks and don't let BTV deleted anything.

As for your categories, it isn't as hard as you think to do it with folders.

First, setup separate folders in BTV for each category. Then go into each show and change it to be in the right category. This is permanent and BTV will record into that folder.

After that, just use Folders to find the right category.

I use this all the time. You can even setup folder under folders and then use Recurse directory on the highest level folder. This lets you drill down into the folders under folders.

Hope that helps.

[btv02472]

As of yesterday, my trial license expired so I can't easily try saving shows by folder.

I've been working this product for the last few weeks and this was a frustrating piece that I never figured out.

Looking at the help pages for "Video Folders" it seemed like this is an all or nothing option, not a show by show option.

Can you point me to the page I need to read?

As for the Delete feature, it seems pretty basic too. This is version 4.7.

The product does lots of the things I need, but this seems like it might never happen if it hasn't happened yet.

Dominick

[tscales]

You setup the video folders. Then you edit the details of the SHOW to point to the folder.

As for the delete option, Snapstream isn't that big. I suspect they're focused more on adding features like Ipod and HD support. Most of us just buy disks. They're cheap.