Whats the best option these days for building a home theater PC (HTPC)?
I just did this. I too, was confused the abundance of options. Decided on Vista Media Center, and am more than pleased. I will describe my setup, point out its pros and cons, and you can see if you might like something like this. HARDWARE: Anything cheap will do. I bought a mobo with integrated sound/video/lan/etc, and it works. I threw the cheapest core 2 duo CPU I could find into it, and it decodes anything and everything just fine. You will want a LOT of hard drive space. And I recommend 2 gigs of RAM (cheap enough these days). OPERATING SYSTEM: Vista. I used x64, but regretted it. No benefits, but additional headaches finding drivers, especially codecs. I would go with x32. When you get it installed, disable all the fancy graphics, indexing/searching, etc. You won’t need any of that since all you will do is run media center. AUDIO: The mobo I got came with a digital audio output header, but no dongle. So I hacked something together and ran the digital audio thru SPDIF to my receive
