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.

Nero and TiVo are launching a new application called LiquidTV. Basically, LiquidTV is TiVo. But instead of running on a set top box, the software runs on a Windows PC.

Users get all the basic features that come with TiVo, including the abililty to watch live and recorded TV, pause live programs, and record programs for viewing later. You can also burn videos to a DVD or compress them to save space using the H.264 codec. There are preconfigured settings for saving videos for an iPod or PSP or you can choose custom compression options.

LiquidTV plays well with other TiVo boxes you may have in your house, as long as they're hooked up to your home network. You can watch programs recorded on your TiVo box on a computer running LiquidTV and vice versa. You can also schedule recordings on the go using a web interface.

There's no Mac or Linux version yet. And while you do get TiVo goodies like WishLists and KidZone, the software doesn't support some of the more advanced TiVo options like TiVoCast or TiVo HME applications.

It's official. There are now almost as many companies making software that turns your PC into a digital video recorder as there are computer users who want their PC to be a digital video recorder.

Last week TiVo announced a partnership with Nero to produce a PC version of the company's popular DVR interface. And today Digeo has announced plans to launch its own PC-based media center software. While Digeo might not be as familiar a name as TiVo, the company produced the Moxi interface used by a handful of cable providers.

Moxi TV for PC will be a full fledged media center application allowing users to schedule and record TV shows up to two weeks in advance. You can also access movies, pictures, music and online media, using a 10-foot interface, meaning the software would run great on a PC in the living room. You'll need a TV tuner for your PC to record and watch live television.

There's no word on the pricing or availability of Moxi TV for PC yet, but Digeo is currently seeking beta testers. You can sign up at their site.

Moxi TV for PC joins a long list of PC-based PVR software ranging from the commercial (Beyond TV, SageTV, ReplayTV PC Edition, CTpvr) to the free (gbpvr, mythtv, media portal).

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.

Easy TV Data was created in response to Zap2it Labs announcement that they would be discontinuing their free TV listings XML based service effective September 1, 2007, due to abuse of the service. Although, tight on the details, it looks like Easy TV is in negotiations with Zap2It Labs to transition the service so it can continue, hopefully without interruption.

Myth TV, a free DVR project, was especially threatened by Zap2It's announcement since their XML service is more easily parsed for usage in a scheduling database, and for which commercial service is not available.

Three lead developers for MythTV founded Easy TV as a result . Other founding members include reps from XMLTV and MacProGuide. Stay tuned for more details.

By the way, If you are a contract lawyer, familiar with US non-profit law and would like to provide pro bono service, (at least initially) Easy TV wants to talk to you.

[via Linux.com]

Good day Linux fans! As of yesterday, the new version (0.20) of MythTV is ready for your downloading and PVR pleasure. This release is new, (obviously) and features some new stuff: better DVD playback, DVB radio channel support, mouse support, and MythArchive (a new plug-in), which allows your recordings to be burned to DVD. For a while now MythTV has been a great and cheap way to get yourself a nice and moderately full-featured PVR. If you don't want to pay tons of money to get a manufactured PVR, MythTV (for Linux) makes a nice PVR box. I still haven't set up a PVR using MythTV, but I keep meaning to. I have a PC I have my eye on for this purpose, an older one, so maybe I will get with it and install MythTV someday soon. Any suggestions as to what Linux distro is best for MythTV? How about for general desktop consumption? Any that you recommend?

[Via Slashdot]

In what has to be one of the fastest app re-brandings in history, Yahoo!, which acquired media center software maker Meedio last week, has released Yahoo! Go TV, a free re-branded version of Meedio for Windows. Yahoo! Go has all of the features you'd expect to see in a media center, including music, videos, photos, and full-fledged DVR functionality, plus the ability to search Yahoo! videos and, of course, view photos on Flickr.

[Thanks, Ken!]

Our pal Eliot Phillips over at Engadget has written an awesome how-to on building a practical Home Theater PC for about $1,000. The end result is a beautiful black Pentium 4 machine with a gig of DDR2 RAM, 250GB of SATA storage rounded out by and a nice Hauppauge dual-tuner card with on-chip MPEG2 encoding and a MythTV install. If you want a solid HTPC without spending a fortune, listen to Eliot, he know his stuff.