Digital Home Thoughts: SnapStream Media's Beyond TV 4

Advanced Squeezing
The basic features work, but advanced features are always nice. And to take advantage of these advanced options, you use Beyond TV 4's Web Admin. Running on port 8129, you can connect to the BTV box from practically anything with a web browser (Figure 27). And from that point use either the basic or advanced functionality of Beyond TV 4.


Figure 27: The Beyond TV 4 Web Admin interface.

Most useful to me is the ability to modify the ShowSqueeze capabilities to allow for better compression, adjust the start/stop times for the squeeze (Figure 28), and even queue up shows to be squeezed (Figure 29).


Figure 28: Start and stop new ShowSqueezes from the Web Admin.


Figure 29: You can even queue up tasks within the Web Admin.

Once squeezed, you can review the amount of space saved. For example, I was able to take an episode of Cowboy Bepop, which was 1.79GB, and reduce it to just under 50Mb to be viewed on an early iPaq Pocket PC (Figure 30). You aren't just limited to Windows Media when squeezing files either, you can just as easily convert shows to Divx. Conversion depends on the size of the show, and the processing power available at the time of the squeeze.


Figure 30: An example ShowSqueeze, optimized for an early iPaq.