Battleangel

Home Theater PC btw for those not on the level .. anyway. One major problem with a HTPC is of course that a stationary player is so much more user friendly. Booting up WinXP and finding your way on the start menu isn’t really an impressive way to start off a home cinema event. Using a million different applications isn’t really that impressive either.
Many have talked about creating a working “media OS” but no one has come through (as far as I know?). The closest thing today is a combined media player like Media-BOX. What does it do?
It plays your digital media (dvd, avi, mp3) and helps you organize it in such a way that you can display your collection neatly on screen (tv). Reminds me a lot of digital satellite/cable boxes where you can access the media through interactive menus. You can control it via remote, keyboard or mouse, whatever you feel like using. It takes a while to set up but not much longer than organizing the dvd cases on the shelf.
Ultimately, this tool will include ways to view image galleries, play games and even record/view tv sources (with a tv card of course). You can probably get this to work as of now but not with the provided installation. The only features that work is basically the video archive and player.
Anyway. There are a couple of explanatory screenshots here. The most impressive thing is the media catalogue (archive). I mean, wow! Keep your greasy fingers off my dvds This tool will increase your professionalism rating by at least one hundred percent Not to mention your nerd rating

For the sake of fairness you should also consider the Freevo interface (Linux open-source that uses Freetype2, MPlayer, NVrec, mpg123, lirc and god knows what). Probably the only such interface for Linux platforms? There is also a list of similar projects on this page if you’d like more options. I still prefer to stay within the boundaries of Windows for certain reasons.