Quest for the best Media Center for your living room - and beyond

What are your choices for a computer-based Media Center (MCE) in your living room?
The most standard and obvious ones are
1. Mac with FrontRow
2. PC with Windows MCE or Vista
3. Windows with 3rd party MCE software
4. Linux with opensource MCE software

In the quest to find out what is the best, I came across LinuxMCE which promises lots of bells and whisles including Home Automation features like connecting to Z-Wave devices for appliance or lighting controls.

So I decided to be brave and try to install LinuxMCE on my existing Windows XP computer sitting in the living room running on a Dual-core X2 AMD CPU with the 690G chipset.

I will not go into details of the install, but the conclusion is the install is not straight forward and has just too many non-working components. I cant even get the install to go into the right resolution(720p) that I wanted, and the text were too tiny to proceed.

Bottom line - LinuxMCE is not ready for deployment yet, not until they can sort out the install and at least certify the software on a few standard video and audio capabilities.