RedRat Tuner for Beyond TV v1.02 a freeware Tuner plug-in dll for Beyond TV (Obsolete)

This download is a freeware Tuner plug-in for Snapstream Beyond TV which allows you to control a set-top box using a RedRat3 IR device. For people who have visited my web site before, you may well known that I have been using Windows Media Center Edition (and Showshifter before that), but one area which I was disappointed with was it use of MS's proprietary dvr-ms file format. Also it cannot handle multiple channels where the sources are mixed. Another weakness MCE has IMHO is that you cannot stream live TV from the MCE device to another PC (My MCE machine is upstairs next to my Sky+ box but I do most of my TV viewing in my computer room which is downstairs. I do have the TV signal via coax down in the computer room, but the picture is pretty poor, plus the audio is only mono). Before anyone emails me saying "oh yes you can stream from an MCE", AFAIK you can only do this to an Xbox 360 using the Media Center Extender Software, but I'm not really into games and want it streamed to one of my computers and not to a TV. Over the last few weeks I have been playing around with Beyond TV and it addresses all of the shortcomings as I see it with MCE. Recording is done to a standard MPEG2 file and meta data for a recording / show is stored in separate xml file, files can be compressed to DivX and WMV natively, streaming is supported to PC's via their Beyond TV Link software and their multiple tuner architecture is much more flexible compared to MCE. Beyond TV also has a comprehensive SDK for the developer community. Unfortunately the one area where Beyond TV is weak (at least for us Europeans) is EPG support. Fortunately I already use and much prefer DigiGuide which provides a comprehensive PC based EPG. In addition I have installed a customized version of the SnapStream Schedule Plug-in for DigiGuide which allows me to schedule recordings at my main computer downstairs and send the recording request to the Beyond TV PC upstairs. Changes were made to the digiadd.aspx file which is included with the SnapStream Schedule Plug-in for DigGuide, so that it works correctly with the latest version of Beyond TV (The plug-in was originally developed by Jeremy Tilson to support Snapstream v3). You can download my update version of digiadd.asp here. All you need to do is copy my version of this file over the existing version (You probably should make a backup of the existing file first). This file should normally be located at "c:\Program Files\SnapStream Media\Beyond TV\wwwroot". I have rewrote this page to use C# ASP.NET instead of VB.NET as I am more familiar with the syntax of C#/C++. Finally on the Beyond TV machine, I installed my new Tuner plug-in (which is distributed as a MSI file created using Wix v3). The plug-in includes a sample RedRat database for the Sky+ box but you are free of course to use your own database from the RedRat support pages. Most of the configuration details are taken care of by the MSI install but full details on further configuration of the plug-in is included in a readme which gets installed along with the plug-in. The source code for the tuner is also included in the download, as well as the Wix v3 files to generate the install. The documentation for Wix v3 is sorely lacking at the moment, so you might want to use it as a tutorial for using Wix.

To keep the size of the MSI file download to a minimum, a number of external prerequisites are checked when the MSI is first run. They are:

• You must have Beyond TV installed (Hopefully that one is pretty obvious!)
• You must be running Windows 2000 or later as the plug-in is implemented using Unicode.
• You must have the Microsoft .NET Framework v1.1 installed as the SDK provided with the RedRat device uses this technology. You can install this using Windows Update.
• You must have the RedRat Runtime installed. This is available for download as a zip file from http://www.redrat.co.uk/SDK/RedRat_Runtime_V1.22.zip on the RedRat web site.
• The plug-in itself was developed using MFC (my favorite development framework!) and Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 and as such requires the VC 2005 SP1 runtime libraries are required.

Once you have these prerequisites installed, you should then be able to rerun the msi file without any issues.

Copyright

• You are allowed to include the source code in any product (commercial, shareware, freeware or otherwise) when your product is released in binary form.
• You are allowed to modify the source code in any way you want except you cannot modify the copyright details at the top of each module.
• If you want to distribute source code with your application, then you are only allowed to distribute versions released by the author. This is to maintain a single distribution point for the source code.

Updates

12 May 2016

• Please note that I have discontinued development of this code and it is obsolete. This is because SnapStream have stopped selling Beyond TV. Fore more information please see http://www.snapstream.com/goodbye_beyondtv/.

V1.02 (6 June 2008)

• Updated copyright details.
• Now uses v1.07 of the author's AppSettings classes
• Now uses v1.76 of the author's CNTService classes
• Code is now built with VC 2005 SP1

27 May 2007

• Updated the page to include a link to the updated aspx page which I have produced for the SnapStream Schedule Plug-in for DigiGuide.

23 October 2006

• Install now uses best practices for coding launch conditions to ensure they do not interfere for upgrades or uninstalls
• Install now uses best practices for detecting the .NET framework

V1.0 (20 October 2006)

• Initial public release.