I use a home-built Windows media center for all my TV needs.  I’d like to share a few of the choices I made in hopes that others will avoid my mistakes.  It’s been a rocky road at times, but there’s really no other platform that works for me in the living room.  The pros include a very intuitive and responsive interface, expecially when looking through the guide and searching for programs to record.  TiVo was downright sluggish at times.  Well, here are my points:

• Choose your tuner card carefully.  I started with an NVTV card from EVGA to began, and it brought me nothing but heartache.  I kept getting some weird compression artifacts, and wound up sending it back and getting the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 500 MCE.  That solved my tuner woes right away.
• I went with an Intel based system to start with, both for price and for the Intel platform’s reliability.  As of today, I’m really feeling the pinch of the Celeron processor, and those new Core 2 Duo chips are in an attractive price range.  My desktop machine runs an AMD X2, and I would strongly consider that platform for a media center.
• Video card matters!  Nothing caused me more grief than the fact that MCE2005 needs a DX9 video card.  I had tons of nice cards laying around that I thought I could just throw in.  I had a Radeon 9600, a decent GeForce 5200, and so forth.  No good.  I wound up getting a Radeon X300SE, since it was DX9 and cheap.  Well, none of the MPEG2 decoders I tried would work right with this card.  The only one I was really interested in, Nvidia’s PureVideo decoder, doesn’t play nice with ATI.  I’ve got a new video card on the way, a Geforce 7300LE from MSI.  This one has all the PureVideo acceleration built in, so hopefully that takes a little burden off my little Celeron until I can upgrade it.

Well, those are my lessons for the day.  Hopefully if you’re looking at building a Media Center, that gives you a few ideas.  Of course, Vista is promising to screw up all the above info, so watch this space.