I am going to be putting together a PC to handle all of the home theater/radio/mp3/tv/etc. in my living room. I have a pretty good assortment of hardware already that I want to use and want to keep my investment to a minimum.

It has to be EASY to use (read: minimum # of remotes) to please my wife and the interface has to NOT look like a computer (to once again please my wife who looks at a computer all day at work).

Here's what I have so far (lspci's are courtesy of knoppix):
-An awesome black desktop style case that I hope I can use, if I can do some motherboard juggling (the motherboard I have for the job right now will not fit in the case).
-AMD Athlon XP 2600 (legacy Athlon, not the 64 bit one)
-512 MB of DDR
-Radeon 8500 and an Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440 (advice on which one to use would be nice)
-tuner/capture card that works surprisingly well in XP. I am praying for some level of linux support.
lspci:
-Hercules Gamesurround Fortissimo III 7.1 (I only plan to use it in 5.1 mode though, and standard Crystal drivers won't work in XP because Hercules strayed too far from the reference design, so linux support may also be touchy on this, although Knoppix seems to somewhat support it out of the box)
lspci:
-black-faced IDE DVD-ROM drive
-Sharp XR-10X projector
-Pioneer VSX-D411 Receiver/Amp
-Infinity mains/center and Sony surrounds (all of which I love)
-RCA Powered sub (pretty good)
-IR wireless keyboard/mouse that I hate like the plague
-Dish Network Service/Receiver
-I am a big fan of Suse, so I will probably use Suse 10.0 or 10.1

A little research has revealed that there really is no way to use a pc as a Dish Network receiver, especially under Linux. There is a gizmo called IR Blaster that can control a Dish box that I am aware of, but I don't know anything about its Linux compatability or of any other options that would help me get PVR tasks going.

What I seem to need at this point, hardware-wise, is a better keyboard/mouse setup and a universal remote (that can handle my Sanyo VCR, volume on the Pioneer receiver, the aforementioned Dish/PVR control, powering the projector on/off to save bulb life, and controlling Myth or whatever front end and multimedia players I use).

The remote is probably a pretty tall order, but I would like to get at least a few of the listed functions out of one.

The Pioneer receiver is actually an upper low-end model, but the basic 5 channel amplification is awesome, and I won't be using it for any type of video or audio switching/decoding tasks if I can help it.

Am I off to a good start? What are my next steps? What are my options for the remaining hardware?

TIA,

J

Well for a HPTC machine I wouldn't recommend using a bt878 card. The image quality isn't that great and your processor and memory are left up to the task of doing all the encoding in software.

Get a new hauppauge PVR150 with remote control and you are killing a few birds with one stone, the quality of the image is much much better then the bt878, it comes with a remote and ir blaster that will control your satelite box. Use the nvidia card, hauppauge card and have a good long look at mythtv. There are SuSE Rpms available, and they work very well.

I have tow systems running mythtv and a total of four tuners all hauppauges. I couldn't be happier and my 4 year old granddaughter can handle the interface.

http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythFeatures

I use KnoppMyth for my media needs. It works very well out of the box. I have an NVidia 5200, 2 Hauppauge 250s, a SB live, Sempron 2400+ and 512 ram. It even plays Sonic the Hedgehog.

This may be a helpful article: http://www.linuxis.us/linux/media/howto/linux-htpc/

Wow, thanks for all of the feedback, everyone!

For the record, I am pretty sold on Myth. I showed some screenshots to my wife and she really liked the looks of it, so that just about sealed the deal (can anyone say "PW'ed"? )

It looks like a Hauppage card would do me a lot of good because of its onboard hardware decoding, but I'm not so sure I want to shake the money loose. We'll just have to see on that.

I gather that if I use an infrared kb/mouse (maybe the one I already have if I can minimize its use), LIRC, one of these, and one of these along with some type of "learning" remote, I can do some ridiculously complex configuring and end up with a remote that can do everything I listed in the post that I started this thread with. Can anyone recommend one of these "learning" remotes that is up to the task?

Here's the rub: I have 2 external devices from the HTPC itself: the Dish box and the VCR. I don't think I will EVER be doing any recording with the VCR, so all I really have to worry about wiring it up is its composite and stereo outputs, but where are they going to go? The inputs on the sound card and tuner/capture card are going to be monopolized by the higher-priority Dish box, and this brings us to another potential pitfall:

The tuner/capture card supposedly requires a cable from its external audio output to the sound card's external aux input. ick! Now, I read a day or so ago about a package that will allow most bt878 cards to use their audio through the bus and not eat up the sound card's input (which I need for the Dish box), but now I can't find the site again! Does anyone know what this package is so I can see if it works with my Pixelview PlayTV Pro?

Once I get past that, how does anyone suggest that I get the VCR and the Dish box both piping video and audio signals into the HTPC?

Thanks for the great links and input! Keep it coming!

J

OK, I just found it. The package that will allow a bt878 card to pipe its audio through the pci bus instead of a patch cable to the sound card is btaudio...

Does anyone know if the Pixelview PlayTV Pro happens to be one of those few cards that cannot utilze this function?

See my posting on Remote Central:

http://www.remotecentral.com/cgi-bin...thread.cgi?131

It also seems that btaudio will only allow the audio data going through the pci bus to the sound card to be mono; no stereo sound from my vcr or dish is not acceptable! Am I reading that right? If I am, Hauppage wins the day for sure!

Still looking for input!

Thanks everyone!

J