I just found Media Portal, a SourceForge project for MS Windows, which is completely free of charge. The program creates what its name implies: a media portal. Through this program, the idea is you'll watch your pictures, music, video and lots of other things. It contains a lot of plug-ins (e.g. Tetris and MS Messenger) and the TV portion allows the user to plug in a TV card, which in turn means it'll help you record everything you can show through your TV cable. Do do this, it allows you to (quite) automatically download TV channel guides. I tried it for Sweden, and it works. Brilliant.

It reminds me a whole lot of Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, yet Media Portal is 1) free and 2) a lot more configurable. Here are a bunch of screen-shots of the program, and remember you can configure it to use different skins. Note that I haven't recorded anything through it yet, due to my not owning a TV card. On the other hand...

Next month I plan on buying a Hauppauge USB 2.0 TV card. That sucker and a USB 2.0 card will have me one up on our VCR. Brilliant!