Anyone got a Media Centre ?

That looks pretty sweet _A, go for it.

I'm doing the same at the end of September build a media centre pc BUT not use media centre. I'm gonna use XP or Vista because MC has codec issues with most of my avi's.

So I'm gonna use a wireless keyboard, something similar to this one
http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=433757
and use VLC player to play my movies on cos VLC also plays .MKV files too.

Another thing _A get your self a copy of SlySoft's Anydvd which is needed for the odd Bluray protection that you may or may not come across, better to have it installed just in case. That plus the software that comes with the LG is all I'm using at the moment.

Looks nice

Quick word of warning, avoid ATI All-In-Wonders for media centres - apparently you cant use the TV-In under Vista, and it looks like theres no plans for ATI to rectify it. Other than that, any TV-in card with hardware MPEG encoding ought to work well, I'm using an ancient Hauppauge PVR-150 and it captures nicely, can make DVD-quality recordings off Sky happily.

If you're looking at http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/product ... hdpvr.html for HD capture, be warned that it doesnt support Media Centre yet and needs to use its own capture app. MC support is supposedly in the works but don't rely on it. Probably better off getting one of the non-HD internal kits as they tend to come with the remote and IR blaster.

FcUK_I wrote: That looks pretty sweet _A, go for it.

I'm doing the same at the end of September build a media centre pc BUT not use media centre. I'm gonna use XP or Vista because MC has codec issues with most of my avi's.

So I'm gonna use a wireless keyboard, something similar to this one
http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=433757
and use VLC player to play my movies on cos VLC also plays .MKV files too.

I wiped my Media Center a couple of months back, switched it to a Linux install to give me a bit more control over what it can do.

Am using a Debian Linux base, with Freevo as the media center software. I'm still working on getting TV integration on it but have set up command-line scripts to record, change channels, and also to use VLC to stream out both live TV and recordings/downloads across the network (laptop works fine, unfortunately my XDA isn't quite powerful enough to play the stream or I could have a pocket telly!)

sweet stormdog sounds like a nice setup. I'm also gonna use VLC to stream my media I got almost 3TB worth of media to put into the media pc when i build it.