I've been looking getting a home theatre PC for myself recently, and I'm not sure what to do. See, the dilema is that Windows Media Center 2005 is rather dated these day, and 2007 only comes with Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate which would cost me in the order of $400 (on top of the cost of the PC itself, of course! I'd be going home-made here, not OEM because there's certain parts that I specifically want...)
So I've been looking at my choices on Linux, and -- as with anything Linux, it seems -- my choices are quite varied, but nothing seems to live up to expectations.
Of course, there's Linux MCE which looks to be about as full-featured a product as you can imagine, but it's rather lacking in the compatibility stakes (which may not be a problem for me if I'm buying everything from scratch). It's also relatively new, and it doesn't quite have the "polish" of other solutions.
Then there's Elisa which looks more polished but doesn't have the features (not even TV integration!) -- that's pretty much a killer right there
Of course, there's MythTV, but that's more of a PVR than a full-fledged Media Centre (in fact, Linux MCE uses MythTV as its PVR). It's pretty good for what it does, from what I understand, but again not all the features you'd want.
There are many more, but I'm not going to list them all... this is not a review :)
But it seems to me that the common theme here is that you've got many projects, but they're all still in too early a stage to be really useful. I'm not really sure what to do... I'm not sure I like the way that Linux MCE pretty much takes over your installation. I'd want to use the PC as a normal PC as well (though I'd probably dual-boot with Windows XP so I can at least play games as well :p)
Still, I'm probably a few months off actually buying anything. I want to make sure that when I get something, I get the right thing.