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No, no, I'm just saying that's what's DEFINATLY required.  The video card/CPU/motherboard/RAM/case/fans/cables etc are all in a normal PC.  If you don't want to do video capturing, you don't need a tuner card.

Ok I like downloading lots of media via torrent such as albums and tv shows. Anyways right now I download them all on my desktop computer and then if its a dvd I burn it and than play on dvd player connected to dvd, and if its a divx file I burn a cd of that and it can play on my dvd player which has divx support. But say I wanted to make things easier, is there any software that will do this:

Basically I want to have a small computer sitting next to my big TV where I can use the tv to:

1. Surf the web
2. Be able to connect to the internet and browse sites and download media such as movies and music albums
3. Be able to pop a dvd/audio cd and have it rip it and store it and be able to play it back
4. Be able to pop in a media card, mmc, sd, and rest, and be able to browse pictures

How much would a computer also cost in able to do these things?

You don't really need anything other than a regular PC to do all that.

Hardware needed:
1.  Ethernet card
2.  Ethernet card
3.  CD/DVD Drive
4.  All in one card media reader

If you don't want to use any of the other stuff that LinuxMCE can do (like PVR and home automation) then you don't need any other hardware.

Thanks, because I'd really like to know.  This might be the deciding factor of whether or not I use LinuxMCE or GeexBoX and MythTV alone...

Agreed.  Even trying to download the installer has been troublesome.  I think I'm going to wait for 1.1.

I know that there are free linux media servers that the 360 can interface with and access the same way it can with the Windows Media Center, but will LinuxMCE be able to do that as well?

The problem (as far as I know, and from what I've learned playing with free media servers) with this feat is that the 360 will only accept the "wmv" codec (and perhaps "avi" but I can't remember).  Some media servers would transcode it to "wmv" on the fly before sending it and that (sorta) worked.  It was slow and laggy, but it worked.  Would LinuxMCE be able to do that?

upon deeper thought I guess it's probably impossible to do what I want with a tuner card becuause I won't have the right inputs.  What I really need to know in addition to the ir blaster question above is if there is a card capable of doing HD video capture from a HD input source (DVI?) that will "act" as a tv tuner card to linuxmce.

So what you want is a card that will accept a digital signal, be it DVI, HDMI or VGA, from your cable box and LinuxMCE treat it as a tuner card, and at the same time, have LinuxMCE change the channel on your cable box to whatever channel it's supposed to be on?

If you find one, tell me.  I need the same thing as well.

Could we then, just upgrade mythtv to the latest version and grab the drivers and encoder card and install it all?

Hmm I guess we won't know this until we get a working version on LinuxMCE up and going...  But theoretically it should work.  Even if we have to do it by source, it SHOULD work...

Would LinuxPCE be able to encode, decode and output high definition signals similar to MythTV with a few hacks and modifications?  It'd be cool to be able to output in 1080p to a HDTV.  I found a couple websites that show how to do it with MythTV but I'm unsure if I should try it for LinuxPCE.  Any thoughts or information would be great.  Thanks in advance.