Karl and Angela Rees

As many of you know, Angela and I use our computer to watch TV. Like Tivo, it lets us pause and rewind live TV, schedule recordings, and so much more (without any monthly service fee). We use a program called Meedio, but the company was just purchased by Yahoo. Yahoo took the program and made it into their own. And since it's now free, I thought I'd take a second to tell everyone about it.

Yahoo! Go TV is more than just a digital video recorder, though. It gives you living room access to music, photos, home videos, and lots of Yahoo content like news videos, music videos, movie times, movie trailers, and so on. It's still a beta product, so it doesn't work as well as Meedio yet (with Meedio I could, for example, play any Nintendo, Atari, Super Nintendo, or Sega game ever made). But it's free, so I highly recommend trying it.

Here's what you'll need to use Yahoo! Go TV: (1) a fairly modern computer (no more than 2-3 years old), (2) a TV card, such as the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 - about $60-70, and (3) a lot of extra room on your hard drive (bare minimum at least 20GB--but more is better). It's probably better if you have cable, but you can use a regular antenna if you want to. Satellite is a lot harder to set up. If you want to hook it up to a TV (as opposed to watching on a computer monitor), you'll need a video card with an S-video port on it. I'd also suggest getting a remote control for your computer, such as the ATI Remote Wonder ($25-50).

After you make sure you have all that, all you need to do is download Yahoo! Go TV and install it. Enjoy!

P.S. If anybody wants me to help setup a computer to do this, feel free to ask. It's kind of fun to set up.