Well, what do you know, I've been talking lately (about the last couple months) that my next project will be to build myself a home entertainment pc. The main reason is to get TIVO-like functionality with added multimedia capabilities. Plus, no monthly fee! So, as I did with my PDA search, here's a list of requirements for what I want. I figure this is the best place to do it, since I'll (hopefully) get people's ideas and opinions on it.
My goal is to have one central PC attached to my television/surround sound that can control everything, including watching DVD's, recording television, playing music (with visualizations), surf the web, watch mpeg's and quicktime movies. In effect, I would like to have one computer to rule them all!
Requirements for Corey's Home Entertainment Multimedia PC:
PVR capabilities, including pausing of live television, rewinding, scheduled recording and series recording;
CD/DVD playback and recording;
Music playback - CD / MP3 / WMA / etc.
Able to upgrade hard drive, memory, etc.
Remote Control
I've looked a bit at Microsoft's Media Center PC, but I really don't like the idea of having to buy a pre-built machine to get it. The operating system looks cool, basically XP with some extra cool multimedia stuff. However, I can't bring myself to buy a whole computer from a dealer for it. Plus, the price tag seems a bit high, usually starting around $1000. I figure that I can build myself a better computer for that.
So, it appears that NVidia and ATI both have a system packaged with a graphics card that ostensibly can do what I want.
NVidia's offering is the NVidia Personal Cinema. The key points are there: Watching / Recording / Controlling live TV; Full Media Player; DVD Recording. I watched their little video today, and it looks pretty cool. I'm still trying to find some reviews of it. I haven't looked at ATI's offering, yet, but I'll update this when I find more information.
Update:
My friend at work, Mark McElroy, just stopped by my desk to say that he picked up a media center pc and is loving it. He searched around, figuring that he could undercut a pre-built, but found cyperpowerpc.com had a media center pc at a great price that he couldn't beat by enough to justify building it himself. So, he picked one up, sounds sweet! So, I'm going to look at them and perhaps pick one up. Mark said that I could come over and fool around with his after work one day, see how it works. Naturally, I'm a bit nervous about chipping out the bucks and then finding that I can't hook it up nicely to my existing sound system. But, from talking to him, it looks like it has all the outs that I need.
A cool side note is that I can then install Virtual PC and run Longhorn on it, as well.