I’ve been using SnapStream’s Beyond TV PVR (Personal Video Recorder - think “TiVo”) software for close to a year now. I tried it back when it was in version 2, and at the time it just wasn’t ready. At the time I wasn’t too broken up about it, because I didn’t really have a spare computer to dedicate to full-time use as a PVR. When I bought my laptop last year (thanks honey!) that changed.

Beyond TV 3.4 is light-years beyond where the product was in it’s 2.x incarnation. It’s so good, that using our TV without the PVR functionality - being able to skip commercials, pause live TV, etc. - just feels wrong now. So, I was very excited when SnapStream announced Beyond TV 3.5, a significant update to the product I had grown to love.

What a huge disappointment. Performance sucks in 3.5, and reliability is even worse. We gave it a fair shot - two full weeks of struggling and cursing the living room computer. And finally, late on a Friday evening, I decided to investigate SnapStream’s forums to see if there was a fix, something I had missed, that would bring 3.5 alive in the way that SnapStream had promised.

What I discovered there were many, many more frustrated people, just like me. And the only recommendation that seemed to have any consensus was to back-rev to version 3.4. I couldn’t believe it. SnapStream has released a product “update” that is so bad, their own customers are recommending to each other and their friends that they stay on the old version. Indefinitely. Meanwhile, I continue to get marketing email from SnapStream imploring me to upgrade to version 3.5. When I reinstalled 3.4, I lost all of my settings - all of my recorded show settings, all of my performance tweaks, everything - and my PVR setup hasn’t been the same. It won’t reliably recompress shows anymore, which is one of the best features BeyondTV has going for it.

Needless to say, I’m disappointed. SnapStream offered some new features in the new version that are very tantalizing - smarter recording so that if there are two shows on that you would like to record, the system looks to see if it could record one of the shows at a different time, for example. That’s not in 3.4. But to get that feature, and others like it, you have to install the buggy, slow new version. It’s not worth it.

SnapStream, you have lost my trust.

So, while I can still recommend Beyond TV 3.4 as a solid software platform to build a do-it-yourself PVR on, I can’t say the same about version 3.5. And since 3.4 is getting long in the tooth, and there are features that PVR users have come to expect that it doesn’t have, I think it’s time to start checking out the competition, like MythTV, HTPC, SageTV, and Windows Media Center 2005, which apparently will soon be available to hobbyists like me as a standalone software product.

Sorry SnapStream, you had a great thing going, but you’ve blown it in a big way. The only way I’ll be convinced to come back is if you can offer a reasonable upgrade to your 3.4 version that performs similarly, and as reliably as 3.4 does. And, judging from your forums, there are lots of people that feel the way I do.

Time to get to work.