8. File Compression With ShowSqueeze, Continued

If your TV has trouble displaying the smaller text in the Web admin clearly, you could run into problems with using this tool. It would be much easier if the Web admin and the front-end interface mirrored one another in functionality. If you choose to use the front-end to manage your ShowSqueeze jobs, you give up some features that are only available in the Web admin, such as progress monitoring.

ShowSqueeze can also be configured to compress your recorded TV shows automatically (Figure 10). You can set the compression settings for each show individually, or have ShowSqueeze compress all your shows automatically using standard or user defined settings.

There is a feature called Intelligent Quality Selection that, when applied, will compress your programming to the most logical quality selection. I found that most of the time it selected a lower quality than I preferred (especially with HD content), so I decided to configure the compression settings myself, which proved to be very easy to do. If you're not obsessive about the quality of your recorded shows or if you haven't gotten around to upgrading your TV to HD yet, it's probably easiest to let Intelligent Quality Selection do its thing.

Figure 10: Quality settings in ShowSqueeze

ShowSqueeze jobs can be set to begin immediately, or they can be set on a user-defined delay to run during off peak times. I monitored the CPU usage throughout one of the ShowSqueeze encoding processes, and it stayed consistently at 100%. However, I was still able to work normally within BTV. I watched several recorded videos including some 1080i HD content during the ShowSqueeze job and did not experience any noticeable slowdown. I even jumped around through the videos and ran an MPEG4 video on Windows Media Player in the background without any trouble.

Other Features

StreamSnip is an interesting add-on that I have not seen before that will be useful for those of you who prefer not to compress your high definition recordings. HD recordings sometimes contain sub-channels that are piggybacked onto the recorded show. They generally don't serve much of a purpose and take up additional space. StreamSnip will delete the unwanted sub-channel content and leave you with the uncompressed original HD video that you recorded. I found that on certain files it was able to trim as much as 20% from the overall file size. StreamSnip also prepares the HD files for processing by third-party editing and compression programs that are not able to handle the sub-channel structure.

Snapstream also has a companion program that works with BTV called Beyond Media. BTV is strictly a PVR application, it so can't be directly compared media center applications such as Windows Media Center Edition, SageTV or GB-PVR, which include more multimedia functions. But Beyond Media is intended to add missing media center features, such as audio and video management and playback, DVD support, photo viewing, online movie rental, etc. There are several bundled deals that are available to purchase in the Snapstream Store that include both BTV and Beyond Media. SnapStream said it is working on further integrating the two programs for future updates.