I'm looking at the trial version, and it's pretty neat. Not exceptionally clear, but I'd be interesting in looking at the networks. This would save the pain of signing up for Beyond TV, connecting the satellite feed to a tuner card, setting up streaming, etc...
It is like 15 bucks a month. I am one of the few users who went to the "pain" of setting up a Beyond TV system. The whole setup takes about an hour and is far from a pain if you do your research.
For absolutely free I can stream absolutely any cable/satellite channel I have in my home to my Pocket PC in full screen.
Does anyone know where on smartvideo they have a specific channel list? I could not find one. I have a feeling they are not even going to come close to offering me all my cable channels.
Allright, spinedoc, you've gotten me to get my lazy keister up and back into the streaming tv game. So now that you have spoken up, give a little advice to a media "newbie".
I need to buy the software from Snapstream, Beyond TV. $70.
I need to buy a TV tuner card--I'd prefer a USB one.
I have DirecTV with 3 lines. Now the one I would like to splice off of is not the TiVO line--should that be okay?
That should get me started. What else do you suggest, and do you have any tips on setup?
heh trust me I'm lazy also. Yes get the software. Not sure about which tv tuner card, check the forums on snapstreams site. I use a ATI 9700 AIW. I think there is an issue with internet streaming with the hardware cards, but not sure.
I dont think it matters what you feed into your tuner card, I would suggest s-video so you can use one sat box for your TV and the PC. One thing you have to do is set up an IR blaster to change the channels on your sat box, very easy to use.
You will also have to play around with your outgoing bandwidth until you find the right balance between Vision and your cable upload speed. It is so awesome once you get it working. People freak out when I am in the waiting room watching TechTV or HBO!
Surfing Snapstream's forums for over an hour. Saw several of your posts! Basically I have found that:
--Use a non-hardware encoded tuner card
--Need the IR blaster as you mentioned
--Either use 3.4 or 3.5 with a modification (which do you use?)
--You need to make several firewall, port settings
--Even with all that, it seems like you have to do some serious tweaking to get it running, but it's possible.
Quick question--does it matter what OS I am running to stream? The PC I have at home uses XP home. I can't use terminal services to access it, but can I stream from it?
I have the VzW version in an EVDO area, so I'm hoping for a successful outcome with good picture.
Originally posted by hatoncat I prefer 3.4, mainly because the system I use to broadcast TV meets 3.4's requirements but not 3.5's... oh, and 3.5 doesn't offer any new functional features to streaming TV, so it really is a pile of complications...
As to firewall settings, all those should be handled automatically if you're running SP2's firewall, others it's easy to configure.
By tweaking, if you mean going to a menu item, chaning the quality, and hitting go... then yeah, serious tweaking...
Home is fine, BeyondTV runs its own web serving software, so IIS in XP Pro isn't needed.
If you're in EV-DO, you should see broadcast-quality TV...
Thanks--I was getting a little discouraged by the scores of frustrated posters on Snapstream's forums who couldn't get it to work.
Many cannot get it to work because Snapstream took it off their supported list, and if you have the newer versions have to do a bit of hacking to get it to work. 3.4 and 3.5 are the best builds as Snapstream has gone backwards in their newer builds.
Any way to buy a copy of Beyond TV 3.4? Searched eBay, and it is difficult to tell what version, but they look like 3.5. Has anyone used 3.5 with the workaround option?
Along the same lines, I saw something in this months edition of Wired that looked pretty cool. I forget the name of it (I'll edit later with the name and possible link), but it's a device that you connect to a broadband connection and your TV signal (cable, antenna, whatever).
Basically, through the device and signing up with a service, you can have the entire range of TV stations streamed over the Internet. It was touted to let foriegn visitors watch TV from their home land no matter where they are. I'm thinking...damn do I hate missing the evening news broadcast while on the train.
EDIT:
I forgot the mag is in my bag....TV2ME is the product and one of the straming sites is Spaceshift.net.
January 2005 Wired, pg. 47
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Last edited by Big Calhoun : 01-10-2005 at 09:42 AM.
I was looking at that Orb.com. I can't really see what they do, except maybe provide a link back to your home PC via a client app that registers the PC with thier service. Seems like you can pretty much do the same thing w/ MCE and a Static IP or DDNS client.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I don't think you can view live tv and recorded video, music and pictures from a remote connection to an mce machine without a service such as orb.
Since I have been using the free trial I stream live and recorded media to my Sprint 6601.
I have used the phone companies service before, but they only give you a small number of channels. With Org I set it up and have available what I want. It definately does such the juice though. I haven't gone down to zero but estimate only about 2-3 hours of streaming at the rate my power has drained.
You can use a Media Extender Device (or MS Media Extender for Xbox) to stream media off of MCE, and I thought you could do it as well from any PC on the Network running WMP. If that's true, doing it over the net is a security/firewall configuration issue more than anything else.
Media extender is a hardware solution within your network, not through the internet. The thing with Orb is it converts the media files to a format which streams through the internet. Because of speed restrictions, there are some artifacts in the streamed video, but you can actually read the words on the screen. I have tried the mobi tv and like the picture better than that.
You can also setup a peer to peer connection and stream other programs, but it can be a pain to setup. With Orb, I just downloaded the software onto my destop and told it which folders to share. So far, this has been the easies and best quality service I have tried.
Media Extenders are hardware solutions, but again, I don't see the difference between putting one on my LAN or out on someone else's network, or the internet, provided you have the network (your IPs, firewall, etc...) configured in such a way to allow the Extender to reach the MCE PC. Orb, to me, doesn't seem like a software version (or emulator) of a Media Extender Device. Thier service is just the middleman that arranges the connection from the client back to the MCE PC.
From what I've read on thier website, it doesn't seem to convert or stream anything, it leaves that up to MCE to do. MCE has a stripped down version of IIS (Internet Information Server) and probably MMS (MS Media Server). You can see this if you create web site on the MCE PC w/ a link to a WMA/WMV file - when you browse the link, MCE and WMP on the client should negotiate a data rate and stream the file (not sure if this is the case w/ MP3s, or the Windows Video Recorder format). I've actually been toying with this on W2k3. I shared my media folders on my server as a WebFolder, so I can browse it with IE from anywhere on the web, and click files to play them. It works fine on a PC running WMP9, but PPC2003SE doesn't seem to want to stream the file over HTTP, only over MMS.
I'll take a closer look at Orb...it's sounds a lot easier to set up than my solution, but again, I don't think it's anything that can't be done with some tinkering for free. I guess I'll need to re-build my HTPC w/ MCE and drop a TV card in it...
This sounds very interesting, could somebody post step by step on what you need to do from scratch to get this working. I have no experience with this.
Collin, what exactly do you you want a step-by-step of? If you're referring to what I described above:
1) Get Windows 2000 Server or newer
2) Install IIS (Internet Information Server) if it's not already, and make sure you can browse to it from wherever you want (LAN, Internet, etc...). On the LAN, you should be able to go to http://ServerName. From the Internet, you'll need your IP or domain name, and will need to configure your Firewalls accordingly.
3) Copy Media Files to Server in a Directory
4) Right-click the directory and select Share. Share as a WebFolder with a name of 'Media' or whatever. This will create a Virtual Directory in IIS.
5) You may need to go to IIS admin and enable Directory Browsing permissions.
6) Go to HTTP://ServerName/Media, and you should see a list of the subdirectories in your media folder. Browse and click to play. It may not be pretty, but it works.
If you install Microsoft Media Server as well, you can stream media directly to WMP via mms:// as opposed to http://. It's easy enough to set up Server-side playlists, but you can't manage them remotely, so you would set up the playlist on the server, and access it by using the url mms://servername/playlistname.
Beyond TV kicks ASS! I have it networked throughout my place! I have the home theater in my living room and then every pc and laptop has the client and my pocket PC phone watches TV through the webadmin stream over my cable modem.... BTV is by far the best solution for anyone serious in this market.
Nice set up! I hope not to have so much stuff, though!
Received my Beyond TV CD and IR blaster today; tuner card should be here on Monday. Can't wait to start hooking it up. Bonus--the version that came was 3.43. From what I've read, I shouldn't update it, correct?
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