Saturday, March 10, 2007

You Don't Know Jack Trivia Game

You don't know Jack is back:

I used to love the trivia game You Don't Know Jack. It was fun and funny at the same time. Well it's back on the web with free one-person games. If there was a way to make a plugin for YDKJ for Snapstream's Beyond Media, it would be a good one. Just a thought. Play it now





Friday, March 09, 2007

My Rant About Time Warner Cable

I'm a Time Warner Cable subscriber and my name is Brent. Being a time warner subscriber and admitting it is like AA. I have no other viable choice though so I stay. I get only the local channels along with one or two additional that are unencrypted Qam while many other cable providers have many Qam channels unencrypted. Their service stinks, they don't understand what "firewire" even means so it takes tons of calls and in-person visits to their store to convince them there even exists a cable box that has firewire that works - mind you this is their very own cable box that they don't even know exists! I've used their DVR's in the past and it was very common to see them push a software update to the box that ended up ruining the box entirely requiring me to replace the box and lose all of the shows saved on the box (this makes me happy I use Beyond TV now).

Another thing I hate about Time Warner is that they have very few HD channels. I mean come on it's not the 80's here and they have 93% of all channels still in SD!

Okay, with that out of the way Engadget has a story that helps explain why Time Warner doesn't have very many HD channels.
"The Senior Vice President in charge of programming doesn't have a HDTV! That's
right, when asked "What is your favorite show in HDTV?", her response was "Well,
this one is easy. I don't have a high-def set."
http://www.engadgethd.com/2007/03/09/the-reason-why-time-warners-hd-lineup-isnt-that-great/

digg story (not to digg this post, but the engadget one)

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Schedule BeyondTV Recordings from your Mobile Phone or Internet

With AT&T recently announcing their new capability for Homezone users to setup recordings from their web-enabled mobile phones, I thought it would be useful to mention these features already available on the PVR software application I use. As many of you already know, I use Snapstream's Beyond TV as my high-powered PVR app. One of my favorite features of this app is the ability to setup recordings over the internet. Anyone with Beyond TV will have a signon and password for snapstream.net and can view their tv guide from any web browser. In addition, you can search for shows, setup recordings and see details of the shows right from any location over the internet. I'll use this to setup a new recording from work or when I'm on vacation and the show records on BeyondTV just like that!
Here's a screen-shot of the snapstream.net page (click on photo for larger screenshot):
You can also access a mobile version of snapstream.net using a web-enabled mobile phone or PDA device. See what's on using the guide and setup a recording right from your mobile device. While Tivo users and AT&T cable users are just now about to get this type of functionality, Beyond TV users have had this for a long time. Rumor has it, Couchville will replace the web guide eventually and you will be able to set up recordings onto Beyond TV and possibly other PVR apps from Couchville also. (More about Couchville here.)
Here's a screenshot of the mobile webguide


















Another screenshot of the mobile webguide drilled down to one movie where you can set up a recording from your mobile device.







To set this up for your own BeyondTV setup, do the following (Thanks to Rakesh for the clif-notes:) :
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Monday, March 05, 2007

Couchville - Simple TV Listings

Looks like the Snapstream's Couchville TV Listings Site got Dugg by Kevin Rose today. That should quickly increase exposure to the site.



read more digg story

Adding a Rip DVD "plugin" to Beyond Media

The Snapstream blog recently mentioned this site as well as Peter's site in this post. That post was mostly to highlight the setup of our HTPC's. Peter's does a much better, more visual explanation of his setup so check it out at http://users.upwardaccess.com/plong/


Since then, I noticed that Peter had set up a "rip dvd" menu item on Beyond Media.
Peter explains how he does it on his site in detail. It's a simple script that calls DVD Decrypter with the selection of that menu item. It then automatically rips the dvd to your hard drive. After that, its simple to "add the movie" in the dvd library plugin and you have your movie on the HTPC. He also explains how to add menu items and icons into Beyond media. Pretty nice work by Peter.
Check out his How-to here: