Over the past week we've been bringing you some of our favorite applications of all time. And most of them have been free. I love freeware and open source software. In fact, almost every application I run on my Windows, Windows Mobile, and Linux devices didn't cost me a penny. But I decided to do something a bit different for my favorite apps posts. I want to highlight some of the applications that are so good or so useful that I decided to pull out my wallet and pay for them. Some of these apps I can't imagine living without, while others are just extraordinarily useful.

First up: BeyondTV, from Snapstream Media. You can think of BeyondTV as TiVo for your PC. But it's a lot more. It's a personal video recorder that's extraordinarily easy to use, but also quite powerful. It offers a ton of features you won't find in the Windows Media Center software that comes with Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate.

Here's how it works. You throw a TV tuner in your computer and install BeyondTV. You can then search for programs by title, keyword, or category or browse a program guide. You can schedule one time recordings, or record every episode or every new episode of a show. BeyondTV will do the rest, including sorting your shows by series.

There are a few things that set BeyondTV apart from similar PC-based PVR software like SageTV and MythTV. For example it has a built-in "showsqueeze" feature that lets you automatically re-encode recordings using DiVX or Windows Media video codecs. You can certainly do this with other applications, but it typically requires a plugin. But probably the main reason I prefer BeyondTV to the alternatives is that it has an intuitive feeling user interface but allows you to dig around in advanced menus if you want to tweak things.

SnapStream Media's BeyondTV application for Windows is one of a handful of applications that should make anyone think twice about purchasing a TiVo or cable company DVR. Like Windows Media Center, SageTV, and MythTV for Linux, BeyondTV lets users record and pause live TV on a PC and do a whole bunch of other things like shrink videos using DiVX or Windows media compression. But one thing that BeyondTV hasn't done a great job of up until recently is allowing users to placeshift or watch video recorded on one PC on another machine.

But the latest beta version of BeyondTV adds a nifty placeshifting feature utilizing Microsoft's Silverlight technology. Users can login to the web administration interface for their accounts to see a list of recorded programs. In the options menu is a button that says placeshift. Click it and BeyondTV will analyze the recorded show and your internet connection and transcode the video in real-time for streaming over the internet.

In other words, if BeyondTV is a TiVo killer (for ubergeeks who would rather build their own, anyway), BeyondTV 4.9 beta is a Slingbox killer (again, for the ubergeek set).

BeyondTV is available for $70 or you can download a free trial version.

TiVo, the company that has become pretty much synonymous with the idea of the digital video recorder plans to create a PC version of the software it uses on set top boxes.

The company is partnering with Nero to develop the software. Up until recently, TiVo's Linux-based software was designed to run only on TiVo-branded boxes. But over the past year TiVo has been partnering with cable companies like Cox and Comcast to develop software for those companies' set top boxes. Once the software was portable, perhaps it was only a matter of time before we saw standalone software.

There's no word yet on pricing or availability, so we're not ready to say whether desktop TiVo software will kill competitors like BeyondTV, SageTV, or Windows Media Center. Part of the appeal of these applications has always been that after you initially pay for the software, you get free program guide updates, while TiVo charges you a monthly subscription fee on top of the money you pay for the hardware.

Come September, Zap2it Labs will no longer offer the free TV guide data used by PC-based personal video recording software like MythTV, Media Portal, and GB-PVR.

Well, there's good news and bad news for anyone using those programs. There are at least two groups, CTpvr and Schedules Direct (formerly known as Easy TV Data) planning to pick up where Zap2it leaves off next month. And it looks like they're both pretty close to having their systems in place. That's the good news.

The bad news is that neither group will be able to offer the data for free. Zap2it is owned by Tribune Media Services. That's the same company that will provide information for th new services, but it won't be free. Neither CTpvr and Schedules Direct, and both companies have set prices yet, but both say they'll have to charge customers for the data.

On the one hand, it's not like the data's not worth anything. TiVo charges customers a monthly fee for program guide data. Without that information, your box is a lot less useful. But if you have a PC-based PVR, now you have a a choice to make. Pay for a commercial PVR applications like BeyondTV, SageTV, and Windows Media Center which won't be affected. Or get a free software and pay for the program guide.

Now that internet TV platform Joost is actually signing deals to get content you might actually want to watch from CBS, MTV, Comedy Central and other networks, you might be wondering how to watch Joost on your TV set.

While Joost really does make watching online videos a bit more like watching TV and a bit less like surfing the web, you still pretty much need to use a keyboard to navigate. And that means even if you run a line from the video-out port on your computer or graphics card to your TV, it's no easy feat to watch Joost on the big screen.

Luckily, you can map the keyboard shortcuts to most PC remote controls. And you can even add an icon to your Windows Media Center Program Library that will start and stop Joost. Here are a few tips:

Snapstream Media, the company behind the PVR software BeyondTV, has launched a new TV listing website called Couchville. It's not as flashy as some other Web 2.0 TV guides like MeeVee, but what Couchville does, it does very well.

The main thing that sets Couchville apart from other sites like TVGuide.com or Zap2it is that it has a web 2.0, AJAX feel to it. Instead of clicking on a "next page" button and waiting for a page refresh to get new listings, Couchville lets you drag the guide with your mouse much the way you navigate Google Maps.

Clicking on a listing brings up information about the series, episode, and upcoming episodes. Snapstream has also integrated BeyondTV Buzz, which lets you see what BeyondTV users have recorded over the last week as well as their top scheduled upcoming recordings. Eventually Snapstream plans to allow BeyondTV users to schedule recordings through Couchville, but the website is meant to appeal to a wider audience than BeyondTV users.

SnapStream Media releases version 4.5 of its personal video recorder, BeyondTV today. 4.5 is a dot release, and doesn't feature any spectacular changes. Version 4.0 for example, added support for HDTV and DivX. But there is one major new feature. For $30, SnapStream is selling a DVD burning plugin that integrates directly into the BeyondTV interface. Now, when you record a show, you can choose to play, delete, save, or burn to DVD.

Since BeyondTV records in MPEG-2, DivX, and WMV formats, you could always have burned your own video-DVDs. But the ability to do it with your remote control from 10 feet away is new. If you've recorded programs in DivX or WMV, BeyondTV will automatically convert them into DVD-compliant MPEG-2 files. Or if you've recorded a high definition program using an over-the-air ATSC TV capture card, BeyondTV will convert the file into a high quality DVD. There's no support for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD burning yet, but Snapstream CEO Rakesh Agrawal says those features are planned for future releases.

I interviewed Agrawal for this week's PVR Wire Podcast. You can hear him describe some of the other features in BeyondTV 4.5, as well as the impact he thinks Windows Vista will have on 3rd party personal video recorder programs like BeyondTV and SageTV. Several of the retail versions of Vista will ship with Media Center functionality.

Product Description

SnapStream's Beyond TV product is a Windows-based Personal Video Recorder (PVR) similar to TiVo or Microsoft's Media Center PC television functionality. It allows you to take any Windows PC (that meets the hardware requirements) and use it to pause and rewind live television, as well as schedule shows to be recorded based on a number of different schedules.

The Beyond TV moniker was applied to SnapStream's offering back when they transitioned from version 2 to version 3 of what was then simply known as SnapStream Personal Video Recorder. The Beyond TV branding allowed SnapStream to branch out into other areas, such as Beyond Media (photos, music and home video management), Beyond TV Link (watching shows from remote computers), and even into hardware with their Firefly brand of remote controls. For the purposes of this review, we'll be sticking to Beyond TV 4.0, which was released late in 2005.

I’ve been a SnapStream customer since before their product was called Beyond TV, and rarely have I gone through an upgrade to such a complicated and historically finicky piece of software that was as painless as the upgrade to version 4.0 was this time around. It made me not mind that I had to pay for the upgrade. Beyond TV is a Windows-based PVR (Personal Video Recorder) software package that allows you to turn a PC into a souped up Tivo. If you have the inclination to take a relatively modest PC - mine runs on a 4 year old AMD Duron 700 machine running at 900 MHz with 512 MB of RAM - and swap out a few parts, you can have yourself a PVR that gives you complete control of your shows.

Among Beyond TV’s best features include the fact that it records all video in the relatively ubiquitous MPEG 2 format, with no encryption or other impediments to moving it around. It can also transcode video to smaller formats like Microsoft’s Windows Media or now DivX, which makes the video that much more portable. You can get video off of your Tivo, but I guarantee it isn’t nearly as easy.

While there are still odd hiccups in Beyond TV 4.0, it’s a must-upgrade for any current Beyond TV users, and well worth downloading the trial version for anyone considering making their own PVR.