Building my own media center/DVR pc, need advice help

[thecavemankevin]

I have been playing with the idea of making a media center pc/dvr for quite sometime now and i've decided to go forth with it and was hoping to get some advice.

I am fairly familiar with backing up my current DVD's using DVD Decrypt/Fab Decrypt, and DVD Shrink. So I'd like to get a few large capacity hard drives ~500gb range and back up many of my more watched DVD's onto it so i can simply browse over to the preloaded files rather than get up and hunt through my DVDs. I was thinking of going with Divx for this, but would like to know what you all think would be best.

I also was wondering what kind of interface would be best for accessing these files? I of course could simply browse to them, but i think it would be really cool if i could simply open up some form of graphical database (i'm not very DB proficient so this will be a big undertaking for me) that i can browse by title, category etc... So any advice here would be much obliged.

I also want to use this as a basic Tivo/DVR device. Anyone have suggestions for the software and pci card? I was thinking about Corel's Home Theater 2: http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satelli.../1177441133768

Also, I will need a new media center computer case, but i don't want to break the bank on this one. Any good suggestions hear will be appreciated too.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[devildog]

windows media edition has you covered for the dvr. can use a handy remote as well. not big on recording movies myself, but the universal medium seems to be divx.

[robnix]

Take a look here:

http://linuxmce.com/

Avoid the DRM trap.

[thecavemankevin]

Take a look here:

http://linuxmce.com/

Avoid the DRM trap.

cool, i've been playing with Ubuntu lately so this may be right up my ally.

[robnix]

cool, i've been playing with Ubuntu lately so this may be right up my ally.

Cool. Let me know how it goes.

[thecavemankevin]

Cool. Let me know how it goes.

It will be a few months, so don't hold your breath