MythTV and Beyond TV

I took a look at MythTV and Beyond TV as DVR software.

BeyondTV, based on Houston, has a really nice website, www.snapstream.com/products/beyondtv, that explains what their software does including an overview, features, how it works and how to get it. On their System Requirements page, they very clearly state that it does not support 64-bit Vista. I appreciate their honestly (and I wrote them an email to tell them so) and then moved on.

MythTV, www.mythtv.org, is an open source DVR. By open source they mean that the software is not a product of an company, but a group developers working together to produce and maintain a publicly available piece of software. Their website states that MythTV "started out in 2002 as a way for Isaac Richards to produce a better TV-viewing environment than his cable company's digital cable box could provide, and through the help of the open source community quickly grew into a powerful tool for watching and recording television." My friend Judy said that MythTV was only available on Linux, but the website says that it will compile on Windows, but it has to have a Linux Virtual Machine to run. (So, Judy was right, as usual.) There are no prebuilt distributions and even the website describes the process of building it on Windows as a "lengthy and sometimes painful process", so I moved on.