GB-PVR: Free Software to Record Live TV on Computer

Recently I reviewed MediaPortal which is a free replacement for Windows Media Center. Today I found a similar free software today called GB-PVR. GB-PVR is a robust, full-featured Personal Video Recorder (PVR), which can record and playback several types of audio-visual media. You can play and record Live TV on your computer’s hard disk, and play them later. You can even configure an Electronic Program Guide, that can help you in scheduling recordings for future. GB-PVR is really good, and easy to use, and still completely free.

To record live TV, you need to have a TV Tuner Card on your computer. Apart from that, you also need to have a source of TV signal, like rabbit antenna or cable. Using these, you can easily configure GB-PVR to become your full fledged DVR (Digital Video Recorder). Apart from this,  GB-PVR can also playback a wide variety of media types across music, videos and photos.

One of the great things about GB-PVR is that it supports a wide range of plugins that really extend the feature set. Some of the popular plugins add the features like weather, music jukeboxes, netflix etc.

Here are some features of GB-PVR:

• Record and playback Live TV.
• Pause, and rewind Live TV.
• The AV content is displayed through your monitor, TV, and/or sound system.
• You can change skins.
• Recorded content is stored on hard disk of your computer.
• GB-PVR has built-in support for many common PC Remote Controls.

GB-PVR supports the latest technologies, including ATSC/ClearQAM/DVB-C/DVB-T/DVB-S capture devices, high definition MPEG2 and H.264 television channels, media extenders (Popcorn Hour, Hauppauge MediaMVP etc), multidec support, multi-record (recording multiple digital channels with one tuner), etc.

If you do not have a Media Center on your PC, give GB-PVR a try. It is very cool, and extremely easy to use. If you just need a good media player, you can try Real Player or Winamp.