ShowSqueeze
One of the main reasons why you choose an application like Beyond TV over Windows Media Center Edition or TiVo is because you don't have to deal with DRM issues. That means that you can play the video you record with Beyond TV anywhere you choose. To make doing that even easier, Beyond TV offers a cool feature called ShowSqueeze. ShowSqueeze lets you compress any recording to Windows Media format or DivX format. You can then transfer small, high-quality videos to portable devices.
 I was able to compress videos using ShowSqueeze to less than half of original size, and the results were excellent.
ShowSqueeze can compress your videos immediately or when the machine is not busy doing other things. You can also configure specific time periods when you don't want ShowSqueeze to do any work so that you can avoid any performance degredation during specific times. I was able to compress videos using ShowSqueeze to less than half of original size, and the results were excellent. This is a great feature that is missing in other PVR applications I've tested.
SmartSkip - No More Commercials
Another great benefit to PVR is that you can fast-forward through commercials. Beyond TV goes one better with its SmartSkip technology and lets you skip them altogether. In order for SmartSkip to work, it has to process each video file and locate the commercial breaks. You can then skip over an entire commercial break by hitting a key (the up arrow by default) and program play will resume instantly. SmartSkip processing takes a while for each recorded program, and you can specify that SmartSkip process a recording immediately or delay it until the machine is not busy with other tasks.
As shown in figure 8, SmartSkip marks all commercial breaks with a light blue block on the timeline. When the commercial break begins, simply hit the up arrow on your keyboard or remote control and the commercials will be skipped instantly.
Figure 8 - SmartSkip
I like the fact that no additional software is required to generate commercial data, and SmartSkip does an excellent job of locating precisely where the commercial breaks are. In almost every case during testing, it marked the exact location to within 1 second and performance of this feature was superb. I spoke to my sister (a BeyondTV user) while writing this review and she told me that she hadn't used this feature because she was concerned it wouldn't work well. If you're in that same boat, cast your worries aside and start using SmartSkip immediately! Once you start using it, you will never turn it off again.
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