[the-me]

Hi all,

I am new here (hello by the way :-) and I have would like to ask the users of XBMC about some tips or their personal experience. My goal is to build myself a little no-worries media center solution. For that I'd like to have my own good looking PC Linux system in my living room, and for that I'd like a hardware base which is "adequate". So I am asking you users here if you can help me out with some personal experience in the following topics:

• casing: Does anyone know a nice and good looking case for this? preferrably without fan, or with a temperature controlled one? something slick, like maybe apple produces? (read: a case which I can place in my living room or my hifi rack, which looks as it belongs there...)
  
• hardware base: which hardware base do you consider adequate for this purpose, maybe with future use of 5.1 sound and blu ray in mind?
  
• remote: Can someone recommend a nice, good-looking, supported IR/bluetooth/whatever remote? And what are your experiences with using XBMC over remote? Is that realistic, or do you really need a keyboard or something? Can you switch the system off via remote?
  

For anyone who is interested, my requirements for this solution (which seem to be fulfilled by XBMC) are:

• playback of ANY DVD (CSS or not, any region)
  
• ignore the user restrictions (like not allowed to skip scenes, trailers, etc.)
  
• playback of all video and audio media files
  
• playback from usb stick, cd rom, dvd - burnt or not
  
• playback from network, best of all itunes playback
  
• ripping and re-encoding of DVD for archive reasons (yes, really). (although this one is probably least important)
  

Any help here would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks & greetings in advance,
Axel.