I have an ATI card, and their software sucks. I tried installing SesamTV Media Center without success.
If you want to build your own standalone PVR (like a TiVo), I highly recommend MythTV. It’s very powerful – you can record and distribute TV and videos throughout your house, automatically skip commercials, rip shows directly to your iPod, etc. It is Linux, which some will find daunting, although some of the bundled distributions like Mythbuntu are relatively straightforward to install and set up.
If you just want a Windows application to record and watch TV on your regular PC, I’ve heard good things about GB-PVR and SageTV, but have no personal experience with them.
A few years ago, I used my computer as a DVR. Initially, I used the software that came with the ATI All-In-Wonder card but eventually looked for something better. I settled on Beyond TV from SnapStream Media.
Best place to find out things like this is AVS Forums
Go their and be prepared to spend a few hours reading up on everything you wanted to know about TVs, DVRs, PVRs, HDTV, etc…
I am a recent convert to Ubuntu and relish bashing anything Microsoft. However, I do give them props: Windows 7 Media Center is the cat’s meow.
MediaPortal works well and is free (Open Source).
Excellent. I’ll give it a shot.
Imasquare - do you have this actually installed? Because it is failing for me.
I do. What is happening for you?
Seconded. Each successive release of Media Center has been better than the previous, 7MC is no exception. It has great support for HDTV tuners, a free program guide, painless install and configuration, and a slick and bug-free interface. It, by itself, is worth the upgrade to Windows 7.
I’ll uninstall, reinstall and take notes. The most recent bug was a failure to catch any channels off the cable.
Let me know how it goes. I’ll help where I can.