It has been a fantasy of mine, for a while now, to have some sort of pc based media center. The hope is that I could use one fairly cheap pc (maybe a PIII 1GHz or so) to act as an A/V receiver, mp3/ogg jukebox, dvr that I could use to record television shows and the like, and be able to control these from a fairly inexpensive universal remote control (i.e. not one of the $200 to $300 remotes that you need two hands to operate and hold at the same time). I know it would be pretty easy to do this if I were to just set it up like a normal computer and connect it to my telvision with, say, an ATI All-in-Wonder and use a sound card with 5.1 output. But what I would like is to have it set up with menus and such so that it is easy to navigate with a remote and a non-computer savvy user (like my wife) would have no problem operating it. So, basically, my question is does anyone know of any programs for Linux that could do such a thing? Also, what else could I add to my media center to make it more comprehensive?

There are several DVR projects out there, browse around and make your choice:
-MythTV
-LinVDR
-LinuxTV
...and there are several others.

As for an All-in-wonder, that's probably the worst choice you could make at this time since the drivers do not support the tuner functions correctly (at least I think that's what the problem is). Look into getting a bttv-based tuner card instead (bt848 or bt878) like the Hauppage WinTV 250 or 350 (the 350 is an all-in-one solution), which both have onboard MPEG2 hardware encoders to offload the CPU, or a cheaper card without MPEG2 support in hardware. These cheaper cards can be had for as little as about $50US.


Håkan

Sound's like 'MythTV' might be what you're looking for. It's at this URL: http://www.mythtv.org .

check this out:

http://www.linuxnetmag.com/en/issue6/m6lirc1.html


these folks might have something interesting also:

http://www.opensourcelab.it/

That stuff is perfect! thanks everyone!