mcbeen.com

I’ve been in withdrawl for quite a few months now since the divorce. You might wonder what from. My Tivo of course. I went back and forth a few times on buying a new one, but finally decided to go the home brew route this time. After lots of thought and debate, I decided to give the snapstream beyond tv stuff a try. It started out bad. The machine I wanted to use had a graphics card that was too old (no directx 9), and the software simply would not allow me to use it. I could record, but not view. I then went ahead and built a machine from scrap that met the software’s needs. It took about two days of work, but I got everything working pretty good. I had to dig on the internet for drivers and stuff, and the IR blaster codes took me almost a week to get right.

Now that everything is up and running, I’m pretty happy. The interface is clean enough to use, and the features are similar to a real tivo. There are some notable missing goodies like tuner state persistance while going to the main menu. If you pause a show, go to the menu to schedule a recording for a show you just saw a comercial for… then you not only lose your place in your show, but the stupid tuner will retune your channel to what ever you were looking at in the guide.

On the plus side, there are some wonderful additions like webstreaming and copying your shows to your laptop for viewing on the road. You can also burn the video files right to a dvd.

I would not recommend this product for the casual computer user.