GBPVR vs. Beyond TV

[BoomerBrian]

BTV has a prettier UI and is always buffering, as opposed to GB's needing to be paused to start buffering, but its flaws were showstoppers for me. I have a paid version, so maybe I'll switch back at the next revision if they fix the problems.

Turn off "Live Preview Mode" in the config and GBPVR will always buffer as well. I believe it is checked by default.

[HtV]

I really don't know how sub's wife puts up with it.

Could be her idea in the first place, who knows, just to keep him busy .
It's a whole new WAF-concept

[wtg]

Does Beyond TV support comskip? If not, that gives gbpvr the edge over it regardless of other features.

Quite frankly, I've become so used to skipping commercials I'd almost rather go back to a blank-and-white 12" TV than give up commercial detection and skipping. I get back 20 minutes of my life for every hour of TV.

[stefan]

BTV has a comskip-ish solution (which I haven't tried), but it doesn't seem too smart from their description:

Skip Commercials With SmartSkip™

Tired of sitting through commercials? Seen the first five minutes already? Quickly watch recorded shows by skipping blocks of commercials or other parts of the show. SmartSkip™ lets you watch TV more efficiently and conveniently than ever.

Turn on the SmartSkip™ feature and Beyond TV will automatically insert markers at major scene changes of all HD and SD recordings, creating chapters. Users can then easily skip quickly from one chapter to another at the touch of a button.

[acegolfer]

I have used GBPVR for 10 months and BeyondTV for 1 month. I use them for OTA HDTV only. Here are my assessments.

GBPVR advantages
1. Free
2. Great community support (Many thanks to Sub)
3. Customizable (skin, utilities, plugins and even keymappings)
4. Better DTV channel tuning algorithm (not intuitive but more sophisticated)
5. Better Web interface
6. Smaller HD file size due to DVR-MS demuxing (BeyondTV records the whole transport stream (tp) including subchannels resulting in 25% larger files)
7. Less CPU intensive

BeyondTV advantages
1. Easy GUI setup wizard
2. Better season pass management (can record only new episodes, conflict management, can extend recordings)
3. Supports VMR9 renderless full screen exclusive mode (critical for smooth HD playback in my slow(?) PC)
4. Built-in divx transcoding and comskip GUI (but both are inferior to customized GBPVR versions)
5. Can change rendering mode (overlay > VMR9) within app without restarting.

I don't know whether it's a good analogy, but to me,

GB-PVR is like Linux and BeyondTV is Windowz.

That's what I can think of now.

[Wylee]

I played with BeyondTV for about a week before moving to GB-PVR.

Picture quality is definitely better using GB-PVR, but what I definitely like is the customizability and an "integrated" solution for photos, music, and net radio.
- To get the same features, I would have to purchase BeyondTV and BeyondMedia which is a seperate application with a different user interface; I could never get the hauppage remote to seamlessly work both applications.

Setup is definitely easier with BeyondTV, but I didn't find GB-PVR all that complicated. I had everything up and running in an hour - what takes time is all the tweaking to get things the way *you* want it.

[Carlito]

2. Better season pass management (can record only new episodes, conflict management, can extend recordings)

Haven't all these issues been resolved/added in the newest version of GBPVR?

[bits]

I currently use both GB-PVR and BTV. I started using GB-PVR a few weeks ago on my wife's computer which has a PVR-150 installed.

GB-PVR has improved greatly since I tried it several years ago and since I have only been using it for a few weeks I am sure there is a lot I have to learn about it.

If it were not for the fact that I have already purchased BTV (about a year ago) and that everything is setup as I want it...including comskip...I would consider using GBPVR instead of BTV. Especially since it is free.

I personally find BTV a bit easier to use but that is probably because I am more used to it.

So far the one thing that is quite annoying about GBPVR is that if you close the app with the window maximized it writes that to the registry and you can not reduce the window size until you delete the values from the registry.

[madcat]

So far the one thing that is quite annoying about GBPVR is that if you close the app with the window maximized it writes that to the registry and you can not reduce the window size until you delete the values from the registry.

If you don't use the full-screen mode, then you could use the

Code:

[B]-pos:x,y,width,height [/B]

Command line switches

[bits]

If you don't use the full-screen mode, then you could use the

Code:

[B]-pos:x,y,width,height [/B]

Command line switches

Thanks...that would work for me but not my wife. She starts the app with the Hauppauge remote and strongly prefers that it be a small window so that she has the option of leaving it small or making it maximized. The problem is that she sometimes forgets and closes the app maximized. I find this to be a rather silly bug...with a the sofistication that went into making this program you would'nt think a very fixable bug like this would remain unfixed. I can not image other users do not find it annoying as well.