I know that we've covered a few articles on how to build your own Media PC before, but this article is a good up-to-date one. With the technology getting cheaper and multi-$1000 name-brand Media PC's starting to hit retialer shelves, now might be a good time to look seriously into building that one that I know you want.

One of the pardoxes faced when building a Media PC is building one that looks less like a PC and more like a home media component. With a number of offerings from Via with their mini-ITX motherboards and small-footprint case/barebones kits sold by Shuttle, we are getting ever closer to being able to build a box without having it look like just a, uh, box. Combine one of these kits with the economical (relatively) ATI AIW cards and their awesome Remote Wonder, you got yourself some serious media storage, streaming and playback capability.

Take a look at this article at Ascully.com to see how you can do all this for under $500.

I built a Media PC a couple years ago using an All-in-Wonder (AIW) card, wireless mouse and keyboard and mouse and SCSI components for higher bandwidth peripherals, but just could never get it tweaked quite right. That and the wireless keyboard/mouse combo only had a range of a couple yards, it just didn't have that "lean-back" factor. As David Limp has said "... keep it simple, stupid! It's all about television, and to the extent that you can keep it simple, entertaining and informational (as television is) I think people will be willing to be a little interactive." In this, as long as I can lean back, flip through channels, play back DVD's, stream some Shoutcast or access my MP3 library, I'm happy. I think that this type of box can do that well.