The best FREE alternatives to Windows Media Center

MediaPortal (Windows) is free open source media center PC application.

MediaPortal turns your PC and TV into a very advanced home media center. The software allows you to listen to your favorite music and radio stations; watch and store your videos and DVDs; view, schedule (electronic program guide available) and record live TV as a digital video recorder; view local weather; and much, much more.

MediaPortal features much of the functionality of a regular Media Center, but as an open source project, it is a lot more customizable than the regular Windows MCE and you can tweak it for your own needs with lots of innovative plug-ins from a large community.

TV Features:

• Supports analog TV, DVB-C, DVB-T, DVB-S and ATSC
• HDTV and AC3 support
• Support for multiple tuners
• Record, watch, and timeshift Live TV
• Advanced recording scheduler:
  - Record once
  - Record now
  - Daily o Weekly
  - Weekdays (Mon-Fri)
  - Every time a program appears on this TV channel
• Timeshifting,Watch, Pause, Rewind, FF, RW Live TV
• Advanced recording management:
  - Handle conflicts
  - Set recording priorities
  - Quality settings / recording
  - Transcode to WMD, XVID or MPG
  - Diskmanagement auto deletes old and/or watched recordings
  TVGuide:
  - Grab DVB-EPG & MHW-EPG directly for DVB
  - Supports XMLTV
  - Colors for genres
• TV Guide search
• TV Channel grouping
• Supports over > 10000 channels
• Auto channel tuning
• Normal OSD (On Screen Display during movies/tv)
• Special ZAP OSD (Shows description of what is playing currently on TV)
• Support for Teletext
• Standby control to put your HTPC sleeping. It will awake when there a recording needs to start

TVersity (Windows) has a free and PRO versions. It doesn't support TV Tuner card, but TVersity is definitely worth a try if you are not intereted in watching TV (TV cards are not yet supported), but it allows to stream content from your PC to Apple iPhone, Sony PSP, the Sony PS3, the Xbox 360, the Nintendo Wii, The Nokia 770/N800 and many more devices. Moreover you can stream to multiple devices simultaneously.

TVersity aims to:

• Deliver any media to any device
• Provide a Personal Entertainment Guide (PEG) by allowing users to create a personalized lineup of channels.
• Provide Content Guides by making it easy to access links via organized lists of multimedia content
• Multimedia Social Networking - allowing users to share links with each other

XBMC is a free open-source media center application for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and XBox.

XBMC supports most common audio, video, and image formats, playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather reporting, and third-party plugins. It is network-capable (internet and LAN shares).

Unlike Windows Media Center from Microsoft or other free software media center applications like MediaPortal and MythTV, XBMC Media Center has no PVR TV-recording and EPG TV-Guide functionality of its own. However it does offer the possibility to integrate such functionality through third-party plugins.

XBMC is expandable via add-ons that include features such as TV program guides, YouTube, Hulu, Veoh, online movie trailer support, and SHOUTcast/Podcast streaming.

XBMC also functions as a gaming platform by allowing users to play mini-games developed with Python, on any operating system. In addition, the Xbox version of XBMC contains the ability to launch console games and other applications like emulators.

GB-PVR (Windows) is a Media Center. It's main function is scheduling TV recording and watching live tv, but it can also playback a wide variety of media types across music, videos and photos. The application is made even more useful with a wide range of plugins available, providing features like weather, music jukeboxes, Netflix etc

GB-PVR supports the latest technologies, including ATSC/ClearQAM/DVB-C/DVB-T/DVB-S capture devices, high definition MPEG-2 and H.264 television channels, media extenders (Popcorn Hour, Hauppauge MediaMVP etc), multidec support, multi-record (recording multiple digital channels with one tuner), etc.

Boxee (Windows) is freeware media center software designed for the living-room TV. Boxee is a fork of the free and open source XBMC media center software which Boxee uses as an application framework for its GUI and media player core platform, together with some custom and proprietary additions.

Boxee enables its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social networking features.

Boxee doesn't support TV Tuner cards.

MythTV (Linux, Mac OS, Windows) is a free open source software digital video recorder (DVR) project. With its plugin architecture, it has been transformed from a mere TV viewing application into a full home media center suite, capable of managing your personal photo, video, and music collections, as well as keep you up to date with the weather, a home security system, and much, much more.

MythTV Features

• Watch and record analog and/or digital TV, including HDTV.
• Pause, skip, and rewind live TV shows.
• Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping, with manual correction via an intuitive cutlist editor.
• Intelligently schedules recordings to avoid conflicts.
• Parental controls to keep your kids out of the good shows.
• Watch and archive DVDs.
• Listen to your digital music collection.
• Schedule and administer many functions remotely via a web browser.
• Flexible client/server architecture allows multiple frontend client machines to access content served by one or more backend servers

Moovida (Windows, Linux) - free open source media player.

Moovida is much more than a simple media player:

• Watch movies & TV shows: Catalog your movies, tv shows and other videos with integrated online content. Moovida supports HD and almost all file formats like divX, mkv, flv, h264, mov, ogg and much more without need for additional codecs.
• Enjoy your pictures: Visualize the photos of your latest trip either from your hard drive or your flickr account in a nicely animated slideshow.
• Manage your music: Access all of your songs easily, enhance your library with online services and find new music to listen to.
• Get connected: Flickr, Youtube, Yes.fm, SHOUTcast and much more - extend the functionality of Moovida with new content from top internet sites. Listen online to your favorite songs, share your media with your friends on your network or scan other devices like your iPod with Moovida.

Moovida doesn't support TV Tuner cards.

Freevo (Linux, Mac OS) - Freevo is an open source HTPC media centre software integrating PVR / DVR funtionality along with music, video, gaming, home automation and more. It is written in python and uses existing popular software such as mplayer, xine and vlc.

Freevo allows you to manage your entire digital media collection - music, videos, photos etc. via a remote controlled TV interface and through the built in web interface you can also access your media, view your TV guide and schedule recordings from anywhere in the world. The benefit of freevo above other HTPC solutions is that freevo is 100% DRM free, plays video in 99.99% of formats, and most of all puts you in control of the television.

Primarily aimed at the Linux platform it is also possible to run on OSX and for the determined on Windows. It is the main mythtv alternative.

Main features

• Cross platform - runs on Linux, OSX and Windows (sort of )
• Watch & record television
• Pause live TV - DVB and analogue (with ivtv card)
• Support for multiple tuners - watch and record simultaneously.
• Separate recording server allows multiple backends and frontends on your network.
• Commercial detection/removal
• Play & backup DVD video
• Play any kind of file supported by mplayer/xine/ffmpeg including DIVX & MPEG4
• Watch the latest movie trailers
• Retrieve video covers & information
• Play & backup audio CDs and retrieve album track lists & covers
• Play MP3/Wav/Ogg/Flac or any other audio supported by mplayer or xine
• Tune into Internet radio from around the world
• Read news headlines and the weather
• View and import images from a digital camera
• Play games
• Control home automation equipment (lights, sockets etc.)