My own linux-based home entertainment system

GeeXBox is a Linux distro meant to be used to allow any computer to become a home entertainment system. I found out about GeeXBox when it was in its 0.9 stage. It was alright back then but it had some bugs and was a bit glitchy. GeeXBox 0.97 is out now and it is incredible! GeeXBox has TV-out support, support for common controllers, the ability to find and play any shared media on the network, an internal FTP server to allow anyone on the network to remote the file system, and support for many different media formats. Many settings in GeeXBox can be customized by Windows or Linux users by downloading the ISO generator and changing/replacing files before the ISO is re-created. I have created two Matrix-style themes for GeeXBox that can be found on GeeXdB.net.

I am planning to build a shuttle box this summer that I will hook into our TV and stereo system. The video card will have to have SVIDEO support and will probably some kind of nVidia. The sound card will need to be very good. 512MB RAM should be good. GeeXBox is live-cd based so it loads itself into RAM on boot and I want to be able to cache as much of the movie I am watching as possible. The CPU does not need to be fancy; just as much as a DVD requires. The motherboard should have USB 2.0 support (I believe it is standard anyways). The motherboard does not need built-in audio or video; however a built-in NIC would be nice.