Difficult-to-use isn't compulsory (Score 2, Interesting)

PC-based systems don't *have* to have clunky, complicated user interfaces. I've been fiddling around with this stuff for about a year now, and what I have at the moment (apart from the noise) is about as good as one can reasonably get.

I'm using Freevo to provide the user interface, along with a simple IR receiver and remote for input. I went with this rather than MythTV because the latter involves the extra administrative overhead of a database -- with Freevo, I can simply drop files into a directory and it'll include them on in the menus.

All that said, the whole thing is rather more work than I'd like it to be. Once it's set up it largely "just works", but getting all the bits set up took quite a lot of effort. Unfortunately I still haven't seen a "black box" device that does everything I want, and that includes the subject of this review.

My next step would be to look at building something on based the VIA M10000, but my understanding is that the TV-out subsystem on those doesn't support widescreen resolutions. A pity, because otherwise it looks ideal.

(I've written a number of short articles on building this sort of system, the most useful is probably this one.