[aptalca]

I would never use my media player as my central home automation server. Media players break, get updated, etc. I want my lights garage doors and so forth on a bulletproof device.

I agree with that. I used to run homeseer in a vm on my nas, but even that wasn't good enough because my server had other duties and needed to be rebooted, updated, etc.

I ended up putting homeseer on a dedicated rpi 3.

But, with zwave you can set this up as a secondary controller which would allow the media center to control lights and stuff, but would not need to be that reliable