TVSquad

There's a dirty little secret in the PVR world. Once you start using a personal video recorder, you're pretty much locked into continuing to use that recorder until you watch all of your recorded programs or decide you can live without them. That's because it's quite difficult to transfer your TiVo recordings to your generic cable company PVR.

Things should be a lot easier if you're using a PC-based PVR with software like BeyondTV, SageTV, or Windows Media Center. After all, your recorded shows are already on your hard drive, how hard could it be to try watching them with a new piece of software?

While you can certainly watch SageTV recordings in BeyondTV and vice versa, things get a bit complicated if you want to sort them by chronological order or view program descriptions. Fortunately, long time BeyondTV user Brent Evans has put together a comprehensive solution for importing your BeyondTV metadata into SageTV. That way users who might want to switch software packages can. Or better yet, users who want to test out SageTV without losing all of their recorded shows can do that too... and can still go back to BeyondTV if they like it better.

The whole operation isn't exactly user friendly. You'll need to download several applications built by members of the BeyondTV and SageTV community, export your BeyondTV data, convert it to a SageTV friendly format, and then import it into SageTV. But in the end, it'll all be worth it when you can see the cast of your cherished saved recording of Howard the Duck.