Dmitri's HTPC Project

After having messed around with GB-PVR for a little while, I decided it was time to try another front end. My friend Rick emailed me that he and one of his friends use Meedio Essentials, and that they were on sale 'til the end of the month, coming down from their normal price $60 to just $20. Now I've read some reviews of the product, and they've all said roughly the same thing, "Great and highly customizable, but maybe too customizable." I downloaded the 2-week trial and so far it seems pretty decent. It includes a beta version of their Meedio TV product and that's the only drawback in this whole sorted affair. It seems like a decent product, but the TV functionality, which was originally supposed to be released in August of 2004, is still just in beta. It took a bit of work to get it working right, and even then it has bugs. Like sometimes when I change the channel, the picture will freeze and the audio will keep going. If I switch it to another channel and come back that seems to clear up the problem within a few tries. I'm wondering if this will burn me when I set it up to record something. I guess that's what the 2 weeks are supposed to show me. One of Rick's friends, Craig, uses SageTV as the PVR software, in conjunction with Meedio Essentials. One of the biggest features of Meedio, which I've neglected to mention is that they are around 200 plug-ins for the application which do a huge variety of different thing from importing your netflix list, loading up local movie showtimes and info, to tools to make importing your music collection easier. I believe this is by FAR the biggest selling point to the application. I'll begin to look at some of these plug-ins shortly. I wish that the Meedio company would just get their stuff together and finish MeedioTV as I imagine it would make this decision very easy for me.