Meedio: An Alternative to Windows Media Center

If you don’t want to do a custom install of Windows Media Center, buy a new Windows Media Center PC, are waiting for Longhorn or if Media Center just isn’t your flavor there are other options out there. One in particular that seems to be getting good reviews is Meedio. I believe this used to be myHTPC (which was free) and now Meedio is $59.95 and you need to have Windows 2000 or XP. There is a 15 day free trial available. There was a promo running last month where you could get it for $20 and today only you can get 5 licenses for the price of one!

Meedio has your standard “media center” interface for music, video, pictures, etc.

What I didn’t see in Meedio was built-in TV recording software. It looks like you need to use third party software like Sage to record your TV although I did see plenty of plug-ins to work with Sage and Beyond TV.

The real appeal of Meedio is the 200+ plug-ins that are available. There is a plug-in so you can stream your Tivo to your PC and a Skype plug-in as well. Here’s an article on how to create plug-ins for Meedio – they really tried to make an open-architecture for their plug-in development so anyone can write a plug-in using Windows Script Components and VBScript.

Meedio may be worth checking out if Windows Media Center isn’t on your horizons and if you’re diligent you can probably get a good deal on it.