Questions from new user...

[DCLXVI]

I'm thinking about building a media computer to act both as a computer alawys connected to the TV and to replace the DVD player, would LinuxMCE do this good or would it be overkill?

Also, I was thinking of building my own case as we want a wall mounted unit but I was thinking about an information display, I can get hold of a simple line display (the kind that shows you the sub-total in the till when you are shopping), connects to a com port and accepts ascii (I can pipe text to it from a command line), is such a device supported?

[skeptic]

Single computer, no other clients?  No possible interest in home automation stuff?  Nothing but computer and dvr/media player on a single box?  LMCE would work for this but honestly if it were me and I knew I'd never use anything other than dvr/media player I'd probably go with one of the MythTV specific linux distros, mythbuntu or something.

[bongowongo]

I concur, do not get a land rover, if you only want to drive the kids from house to school......

[maverick0815]

ask a thousand people and you'll get a thousand opinions...
linuxmce can do pretty well as a mediacenter...and perhaps the name itself is a bit misleading, since it is so much more than a mere mediacenter.
The thing is, its very much scalable and who knows...maybe you'll start out small- as you stated your intent- but perhaps once its installed, you find out, you'll want to do a little more than you had in mind when you got started. It certainly happened to me and there are still a number of things I didn't try or didn't touch- but I'm glad I did.
The good thing is- its free for you, only thing it'll cost you is some hardware and a little spare time. Give it a try and if you find out its not for you- get mythbuntu for example.

just my two cents