Recording Shows
Beyond TV provides all of the features you're used to for recording your favorite shows. You can choose to record all showings, first-runs, etc. Access to other showings is easily available for those without multiple tuners. When you select a show from the SnapStream.Net guide, you are presented with a menu as shown in figure 3.
Figure 3 - The Record Menu
One of the problems for folks who record a lot of television is scheduling conflicts. BeyondTV takes a proactive approach to scheduling conflicts by allowing you to choose to record a show within 30 days as shown in figure 3. If the selected airing of the show conflicts with another recording, a non-conflicting showing within the next 30 days will be scheduled. This is a great feature that makes avoiding conflicts simple. In fact, BeyondTV takes this type of proactive approach to resolving conflicts in many other parts of the interface. It's a welcome approach to a nagging problem.
 Beyond TV gives you plenty of options for precise control of settings for a recording.
Of course you won't always use the guide to select shows to record. You may also want to search for shows or have Beyond TV record all shows that match a specific criteria, etc. For that, you'll want to use the Setup Recordings menu as shown in figure 4.
Figure 4 - Configuring Recordings
Beyond TV provides the expected ability to search by title, keyword, or setup a manual recording of a specific channel. This is also where you go to find out what recordings are coming up. I'd like to have been able to view upcoming recordings on the home screen. Instead, you have to go two levels deep into menus to find out what's coming up. You can also see the next recording in a tooltip by hovering over the Beyond TV icon in the system tray, but the text is truncated due to size restraints, and it's often difficult to tell when the next recording is going to occur using that method.
From the Recording Settings menu, you can also edit the details of a recording as shown in figure 5. Beyond TV gives you plenty of options for precise control of settings for a recording. For example, if you want to automatically ShowSqueeze a specific show (more on ShowSqueeze later), you can easily configure that. In other words, you have complete control over each recording event so that it can have its own unique configuration that differs from the default settings. This is a great feature that you'll find you appreciate more as you use BeyondTV more.
Figure 5 - Configuring a Recording Event
Using Hard Drive Space
Because I record a lot of television, I've got two hard drives dedicated to PVR. Unfortunately, Beyond TV doesn't take the cumulative disk space into account. For example, if you have two 150GB hard drives, Beyond TV will not see 300GB of space for recording. It only takes into account the space available on the default drive. That means that once my first 150GB drive is full, Beyond TV will start deleting shows to make room for more unless I remember to manually switch over the drives.
Many users of Beyond TV have been critical of this design in the SnapStream forums. The general recommendation from other Beyond TV users is to create a RAID array, but that solution is awkward and not available to many users. Hopefully SnapStream will make a change in a future release and allow BeyondTV to roll over to a new drive when one drive is full. After all, one of the greatest advantages to a program like BeyondTV is that you can add new drives to your computer for more recording space, something not possible (or not easily done) with a TiVo-type solution.
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