I just built a Media center !
related but I want to tell you about my last "experiment".
Just under my tv I had a sat receiver and a dvd/dvx reader + a dolby 5.1 amplifier.
I spent 59 € for the amplifier some times ago at the hard discount store, the receiver was a "dreambox" and it costed me a lot and the dvd/dvx reader costs 39 €.
I had the problem that the dxd read was unable to read all the dvx codecs so I thought to build a media center
...
I sold the sat receiver at ebay for the right amount of € and bought a a barebone case, here it is : (Tormie's Minipc)
The I added the old cpu. memory modules and graphic card from my brother's pc (Ok, I bought for him new ones, more powerful, at ebay
) and bought at ebay an hard disk, a sat card (Tormie's sat card) and what I plundered from my brother's PC 
and assembled it all. I needed also a windows xp media center 2005 edition with the IR remote control and a wireless keyboard, mouse and lan card, found at a reasonable price at ebay.
At last it costed me about 400 €, I found the money selling my reciever (250€) , an old russian radio and a commodore 64 C
(But I still have a better and older one here )
It works very well
, but the reason why I posted this message is that if you want to do something similar I suggest you to try this wonderful (and totally freeware ) piece of software :Mediaportal
It's an alternative to the Windows Media Center and it works better, a lot better and has the support for all my old
hardware (I don't need new things to do a simple job like reading some dvx on the dvd reader).
Try it, it worths the cost (zero)...
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