Making a media PC, need suggestions

[SpY]

Picked up a 50" RCA HDTV the other day and i want to use one of my old machines as sort of a "media" pc for it. heres the spex,
Celeron 833, 512mb, 40gb, Radeon 8500 w/DVI, ATI TV Wonder, I also have the remote that Icrontic reviewed last november or so, but i could get a diff one. I wouldnt mind some basic TV recording features but there not a must,........ I Need --> an easy to use interface for playing Music, Divx, DVD, VCD. Id love to give Windows media center OS a whirl but i hear it only works with specific hardware. Windows/Linux are way too involved, i want somethin i can do easily with remote clicks. Maybe some sort of all in one media software with fullscreen support? i dunno, ideas please if you got em. thx.
-JRR

[Edit] I dont even need to use the tv card in it,,.kinda would make it pretty impossible to find an "all-in-one" software package tht did tv capture also.

[dydx]

Take a look at http://ruel.net/pc/tv.tuner.frontend.htm

The best one ive seen though has been Linux based. It's called
Freevo, and i have to say im very impressed with it, and itll be running on my HTPC when i have the time to put together a machine.

You can grab Freevo from

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=46652

[Enverex]

Another option is just to shove WinME on there (light and fast) and use Litestep (completely different shell) so you can then change Litestep to just have all the programs you want on a right click menu, plus it has a Linux KDE style side bar.

I think http://www.litestep.com have it, as the main Dev site is down atm.

NS

[Rob]

If you have the will, freevo and mythtv are two very promising packages. Both run on linux, but should prove to provide ease of use once fully configured with the proper hardware.

Tips? Fast CPU for the video encoding/decoding work, decent chunk of ram, and buy the hardware known to work best with the package you end up using.

[dydx]

I wouldnt use celeron if I were you..

If you decide on recording video aswell, a bigger disk wouldnt go amiss either.


mD