Here's my version of the home entertainment PC:
D-Vine Home Theater PC case with 350w PSU
MSI K7N2G-L motherboard
AMD Athlon XP1800+ CPU
2 * 256 MB PC2700 DDR RAM
Pinnacle Systems DC10+ Video capture card
80 GB IBM/Hitachi IDE hard drive
Lite-On DVD-ROM
Floppy drive
Generic Firewire card
TrueType wireless keyboard with built in trackball
Operating System: Linux, currently Mandrake-Linux 9.1
Why I chose these components:
The case is the single most expensive part (about $250 with PSU) but I consider it worth the price, it's a black anodised aluminum case that looks like a stereo component and therefore fits in with the rest of my stereo/surround gear. This is important if one is married and wants to have a computer in the living room :^)
I chose the MSI board because it uses the excellent NVidia Nforce2 chipset and has onboard network, 6 channel audio and video with TV-out, so I didn't need to buy these components as separate cards.
The CPU is actually overkill for just multimedia use, but the 1800+ was inexpensive, performs well enough for gaming, and has enough oomph to complete video processing tasks in an acceptable amount of time. It'll also crank out setiathome units in an average of 4 hours :^)
512 MB of memory is also on the high end of what's neccessary for this, but RAM is currently cheap and there's no such thing as too much of it, so.... I used two 256 MB modules rather than one 512 MB to get full benefit of the Nforce2 chipset's dual channel memory subsystem, this does make a noticable improvement in performance.
The DC10+ capture card was one I already had, and it can do high quality full frame capture and replay with svideo in and out, so in it went. If I could find a dual channel DirecTV compatible sattelite tuner card at a reasonable price, I'd use that instead.
80 GB of hard drive space is enough for several hours of video capture, our CD collection is OGGified and resides on another machine in the network, so I didn't need to have space for that here.
I added a firewire card as te case has a firewire connector and I want the option to plug in a DV camera.
The DVD-ROM and floppy: They're black so they fit in with the colour scheme, they work, the price was right :^)
The keyboard has a built in trackball, is nice and compact and is wireless. The PC case has a smoked glass window for an optional status display, I chose to mount the IR receiver for the keyboard there instead.
Linux is my preferred OS anyway, so I saw no reason to use anything else for this box. Xine, xmms and freevo are the main software packaged used for video + audio playback and video capture. In addition the computer will do anything a regular computer will do.
It's hooked up to my 55" Toshiba HDTV and my Yamaha surround reciever, and it all works great! :^) I can watch any kind of video file or media, listen to any kind of audio, surf the net, do email or play games
Total cost was about $800 for the machine, which is a lot for a DVD player, but not much considering everything else this box will do!