There is a detailed user manual for BTV included in the software download. This page provides just a brief overview of the main features.

Description

BTV is an application for the Macintosh that allows you to easily view and capture video from any video input source. It works with any Macintosh compatible video input source such as video input cards, TV cards, built-in video, USB, DV, and FireWire video sources.

BTV is available as a classic application for Mac OS 8 and 9, and also a Carbonized application that runs natively under Mac OSX (the Carbon version also runs under Mac OS 8.1 or later with CarbonLib).

Overview of the Main Features

Viewing video

Video can be displayed either in a window that can be resized and dragged around the screen, or full screen on an entire monitor. When you switch to full screen mode your monitor is automatically switched to the appropriate resolution and switched back again afterwards.

For users with multiple monitors, video can be displayed full screen video on any connected to your computer, ideal for viewing video one one monitor while you work on another.

The Carbon version of BTV has a global floating window feature that can make the video input window float above all other applications, allowing you to view video on top of whatever application you are using.

Movie and image capture

Frames from the live video input can be captured and saved to disk in a variety of image file formats including PICT, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, and PNG. The image files can be saved automatically to a predefined destination to enable you to instantly capture images without worrying about manually saving the file. Images can be deinterlaced automatically for capturing a high quality still image from an interlaced video source (such as TV footage). A handy floating window is available to allow you to easily capture frames or movies with a single click of the mouse:

Captured video is saved as a standard QuickTime movie that can be opened with virtually any other video application on the Macintosh (and many on the PC as well).

Options are available to choose the video compression, colour depth, quality, frame rate, temporal compression and other settings:

All compression is performed 'on the fly' as the video is captured.

The sound settings are also fully configurable:

BTV allows you to capture video and sound to several different destinations in sequence; when the first destination is full the second is used; when that is full the third is used. This allows you to use several hard disks to capture a long segment of video.

If you have OS9 and QuickTime 4 or later installed on your computer and you are capturing to an HFS+ disk then you will be able to capture movies larger than 2GB in size. If not, then BTV automatically splits the movie into separate 2GB files. Even if you can capture larger than 2GB files, it is very difficult to transfer these files over networks to other computers so you can choose to split the files anyway.

AppleScript

With AppleScript you can control BTV by writing scripts. AppleScript support is implemented in BTV for many functions such as capturing video, capturing images, printing images, changing channels, adjusting the display settings and much more.

Channel changing

For users with the the ixMicro ixTV, ixTV/FM or TurboTV card, you can set up your TV channels in BTV with an intuitive and easy to use interface (note that the ixTV card does not currently work under OSX):

Keyboard shortcuts

BTV has keyboard shortcuts for easy control of many features such as image capture, movie capture, brightness, contrast, sound volume, and much more. All keyboard shortcuts are fully customisable.