Two thing I'd love to see in BTV

[Asmordean]

Sleep Timer on live TV
I tend to watch shows just before going to bed. If they are recorded then it's fine but if I'm watching live TV and fall asleep my TV, which has a sleep timer, turns off but BTV keeps recording. It would be nice to be able to set it in 15 min increments from 15 - 90mins to stop live TV at that time.

More zoom modes for wide-screen televisions:
Progressive zoom - The center of the screen is 1:1 and progresses in zoom out towards the edges. So people look fat on the sides but normal in the middle. This mode is great for talking-head type shows as well as any show that doesn't pan a great deal.

Different X&Y scale type zoom - There are two basic options now, either you fill the edges and cut off the top or you have the whole vertical resolution and get grey bars. Scale the vertical by 10% (cutting off 10% of the image) and horizontal by ~15%. The result is slightly fatter people but not to the same degree as just a pure horizontal stretch

[Cal]

I'll never see what people see in live TV. Anyway. BTV uses slices for live TV. Your not going to fill up you HD regardless of how long you leave live TV running. so your good that way. However you may want to see if it will record shows.

Its Not an issue if you have multiple tuners but I thought there was something about it will pop up and ask you if it can change the channel if a recording comes on and your using the only tuner. I don't remember what the default choice is.

I'm sure someone will chime in.

[HomeyFour]

My two cents is that I don't like leaving my machine watching live TV - essentially, it's in a 24/7 recording state. To me, its just chewing up CPU time, thrashing my hard disks, and generally warming up the PC. All in all, the wear and tear and power consumption may be totally negligible, but its just one of those things that bother me - I'm the kind of person that wouldn't leave the light on in a room if no one was sitting there. I don't want my TV on or my PC doing anything if no one is using it. I have aggressive power saving timeouts on my PCs. It would be nice to come to an all-in-one solution that will either stop live TV and go back to the viewscape or put the PC in standby, but also turn off the TV. I suppose one could do this with some clever programming of a Harmony remote, but I don't see of any elegant way to do that right now.

At the same time, we struggle with a solution to what happens when a BTV server has fallen asleep to standby/hibernation, and someone fires up BTV Link on another machine and tries to connect - to an essentially dead machine! No simple way to remedy that one... Wake on Lan works for some, but not all.

[dleewo]

I don't mind leaving BTV in live mode, but just 2 days ago, I came across one issue.....

I have 2 HD tuners, but I left one in live mode (TV was off so no one was watching) and the other was recording a show. I then tried to watch live TV (on a different channel) via BTV Link machine, but there were no available tuners. The only option I had was to stop the recording....at least I think that was my only option.

[8IronBob]

Well, in light of Hauppauge's announcement of that TV tuner that has a component input, QAM support, as well as Blu-ray quality recordings, it's only fitting, that come BTV 5.0 and beyond, that there'd be native QAM support, as well as the traditional ATSC, and a plugin for burning TV recordings to Blu-ray, since BD-RW/REs are becoming cheaper in time. Just my two bits.

[rxnelson]

I had Live TV running 24/7 for about a month or so. I just turned the TV off when I was done. Then I replaced the hard drive I killed. After that I usually go back to the desktop or viewscape.

[Jaybird180]

Originally Posted by Cal

Its Not an issue if you have multiple tuners but I thought there was something about it will pop up and ask you if it can change the channel if a recording comes on and your using the only tuner. I don't remember what the default choice is.

I'm sure someone will chime in.

BTW will change channels if you don't respond.