Many of you may recall my posts from earlier this year about the media PC I built that the fam and I have dubbed “PiVo” — short for “PC-based TiVo”. PiVo is actually a computer running Windows XP and the free GB-PVR software. Combined with a TV capture card and a video out connection, the computer (which is controlled with an ordinary looking television remote) allows us to record television programs to the computer’s hard drive, save them, and play them back at a later date. The GB-PVR software has a lot of other really nifty options like MP3 player, photo viewer and so on, but the whole point of the machine was to record television programs. Everything else was just icing on the cake.

The core of GB-PVR revolves around a website called Zap2it. Zap2it gets cable channel listings for all over the country and provides them to people for free. GB-PVR works by getting your local cable program listings from Zap2it. This is how the program knows when and what channel SpongeBob is on. This allows users (ie: ME) to select things like, “record Robot Chicken every time it’s on.” GB-PVR downloads my local listings from Zap2it, finds Robot Chicken on Comedy Central at 11pm, and automatically records the show.

Zap2it is closing its doors. According to their website, they are closing due to “certain growing misuses of the Zap2it Labs data.” I’m not sure what that means, to a free service. This essentially renders GB-PVR/PiVo useless. Sure, it’ll still be able to play things we’ve already recorded, but to record new things it’ll be back to the old days of selecting a time and a channel.

Unsurprisingly, Zap2it is referring users to a new, similar company — except this one’s not free. It’s $5/month, with a virtual promise that as more users sign up, the price will go down. $5/month doesn’t sound bad, except that before, it was free. The real Tivo is a little over $8/month; Cox cable’s DVR is $5/month plus $10/month for the box.

While I really enjoy all the features and functionality of GB-PVR, the thing I enjoyed the most was that it was free.