4. In Use

The installation and setup of BTV went smoothly without any problems. The setup wizard collects information about the remote and tuner hardware; it also sets preferences on file location and configures the channel lineup. The whole thing was painless and took about 10 minutes to complete.

Other than a few overly colorful icons next to each menu item, BTV's overall look is rather unspectacular. The interface is skinnable, and there are a few alternative skins that can be downloaded from Snapstream's user forums here. Even skinned, the appearance of BTV is plain. Some subtle animations with the text or a more consistent color scheme would help to polish its look. The brightly colored cartoon-like icons could also be toned down a bit to give it a more impressive appearance. I'm a little picky because I believe that media center software should be designed to reflect the home theater environment. It should be as classy and attractive as it is functional.

The BTV home screen (Figure 4) is designed to be easily read on a television screen, and consists of a menu with large, white text and a help box at the bottom of the screen.

Figure 4: The BTV home screen

The help box is an interesting approach that I haven't seen before. It provides an explanation of each menu item as it is highlighted by the remote. The help box clearly explains the function of each menu selection so that transitioning to BTV is simple and straightforward. But although the help box directs you further, I noticed that some of the items in the sub menus did not seem to match the parent menu names in BTV.

For example, I assumed that Setup Recordings would only contain the settings and preferences for recording TV. It turned out that the search function, a list of upcoming recordings, and a duplicate link to the program guide were also included under Setup Recordings. While there is not necessarily a right or wrong place to put those sub items, a Setup folder would not be the first place that I would look for them.

BTV is capable of capturing TV in several different formats: TP (TP is a type of MPEG 2 Transport Stream used for HD video), WMV, Divx and MPEG2. In order to capture standard definition TV in real time using WMV or Divx, BTV requires a software-based tuner, unless you use Plextor's ConvertX PVR boxes. The reason that software-based tuners can work with multiple formats is that they are already using the CPU to encode the captured video. So the tuner can easily be set to instruct the CPU further to encode to another file format.

Hardware-based tuners perform MPEG video encoding internally so that the video emerges from the tuner already encoded into MPEG2. Although hardware tuners may sound restrictive, they are still preferable to software tuners because they do not slow down the host system by using CPU resources that might be needed for other tasks.