The upside is that i can have my NSLU2 and the harddisks far away from the living room, and thus keeping it quiet. The Showcenter 200 has no moving parts. Oh, and it has digital audio outputs, so DD / DTS all go well too

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2
[2] http://www.fireflymediaserver.org/
[3] http://wizd.sourceforge.net/
[4] http://www.oxyl.de – german only, but forums are intl.
[5] http://lifestyle.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6745
[6] http://www.rokulabs.com/products_soundbridge.php

Without knowing the capabilities of the TV you have, (presume it is a CRT with s-video as it’s best input, i.e. no progressive, not hd, no vga in) an n-vidia card (or even an Intel video chipset possibly, not tested) is probably your best option for getting video to the TV. There are a variety of other options as well. My own mythbox runs vga into a video projector.

Audio will always be a matter of discussion as to ‘what’s best?’ Long runs of cable to the TV or a tuner are not your friends in the analog world. They are also not preferred in digital, but you may end up with better results than having a PC next to the TV.

Speaking of a PC next to the TV, if you really are just interested in s-video and analog audio, you may want to think about using a Haupauge MVP thin client. I needs a dhcp server that also acts as a tftp server, so the cable router is out as a dhcp server, but you end up running a single cat 5 cable run from the mce at the tv to the computer. It doesn’t work directly with wifi, but with an ethernet-wifi bridge you could even do without that cable. (Remember however don’t use anything slower than 802.11g. a, g or n should all be fine)

If your TV supports stereo in, that’s the easiest destination for your audio cable. It will be limited to stereo however, so your 5.1 out isn’t going to do a lot of good. If you have a home theater audio setup in the TV room, feeding it from the digital out of the spidf interface of the audio card will give you better surround audio, but you will end up with having to turn on both the stereo and the TV for best movie experiences. However if you just want to play audio, you can do so without having to have the TV on as a result.

MythTV supports separate front and back end systems. You can use something like a MCE initially, or a fairly low end system that some people would even consider throwing away. With a few exceptions for standard TV, (PAL, NTSC, SECAM) you shouldn’t need any more than a 400-500 mhz processor. I would recommend faster if you want to use some of the music player’s visualization modes. You can get by with even slower if you use a video card that has hardware mpeg decoding built in.

The Knopmyth Wiki is a great place to find out more about setting up specific hardware, and what tuners work well, etc. Start at the knopmyth site, http://www.mysettopbox.tv and in the links page jump to the wiki.

I use a cheap
00:0b.0 Multimedia audio controller: C-Media Electronics Inc CM8738 (rev 10)
soundcard, because this is one of the few cards that can do 44.1 (for music CDs)
on the digital output without resampling (music is pushed bit-identical to the
output). Cost me about EUR20, and has optical and electrical SPDIF.

IMHO that is the best way to go for remote audio, as there are lots of options for
boxes to hook up to your stereo that will cope with SPDIF digital audio. I use an
Arcam Black Box for this http://www.hi-fiworld.co.uk/hfw/featureshtml/arcamhistory.html
but basically any modern 5.1 receiver should do.

As for TV output, at work I use a cheap ATI Radeon (7000 or 9250 or something)
to hook up the computer to a TV set, and it works just fine without too much problems.
If you connect the TV beforehand, the card mirrors the monitor output (which is just what I want). A bit larger fonts, and 800×600 is quite usable.

if you want to fiddle with code … you can

if you just want to plug it in and have it work … you can

http://wiki.neurostechnology.com/index.php/Neuros_OSD

I use Freevo on my HTPC purely because MythTV hangs it solid. I don’t know why, it’s some quirk with the graphics card. Freevo *works* great: the trick is *configuring* it, which since the configuration files are in pure Python and are not brilliantly documented can take anything from several hours to a week. But once you get it going it will truck along great, and is easily usable by people who know nothing at all about computers.

Audio – depends what you have available. I use a Chaintech AV-710 (it’s a cheap card with a bit-perfect SP/DIF output), connected via SP/DIF to a Pioneer receiver, which is connected to my speaker setup. All my other equipment (Playstation, Wii, cable box etc) is connected to the same receiver. However you do it, I’d say what you want is to set it up so all your equipment uses the same output. I wouldn’t buy separate speakers *just* for the computer, it gets messy. Since you seem to have a hi-fi setup in the same room, can’t you connect the media PC into that? It would seem to be the sensible way to do it.

4 – run at a low resolution. I use 640×480. This is all a standard def TV is capable of displaying, anyway, so you’re not losing anything.

#1 If I were you I wouldn’t buy an ATI for Linux. NVIDIA has better drivers by far, although I didn’t prove S-Video with any card I had.
#2 The cheapest method is connecting PC output to TV input with an audio cable. The problem with that is that you must turn on TV to listen your music. The best way is a good audio card with optical output and a speaker system that supports this method. Optical is the best way since it’s only one cable from PC to speakers, but there are other systems. The matter is that audio card support is not very good in Linux (for high level card, I mean). Maybe you can think about that later and just connect in the cheapest way to the TV
#3 I can’t help you about it. I use Zattoo (zattoo.com) to watch TV via streaming and it’s awesome and free
#4 It depends on your TV, if it support HD, you image can be even better than in a VGA monitor. I fact, many monitors of these TV screens has VGA inputs which can offer a very high quality.
#5 Again, I can’t help you with that since I don’t have any TV tuner card.

Have luck!

Tampoco soy un experto en el tema, simplemente es lo que yo puedo aconsejarte