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My remote media player of choice is an xbox running Xbox Media Centre.

Get a cheap 2nd hand xbox & DVD remote and away you go. Stream music & videos from your server elsewhere (yes, it even supports ogg!). Also supports streaming media for the occasional radio station. Very impressive indeed - I can't praise it enough.

Heck with downloading, I got the new gamepass that blockbuster is offering, and now I get three games a day. With my 250 Gig HDD in the XBox, I'm probably going to get around 100 games on the thing (Seriously, I have 20 games on there now, and I haven't even used 40 Gigs of the space available for game "backups"), plus any that I want to burn to DVD
Also, I use XBox Media Center to have access to all the music (almost every format imaginable), video (ditto), and picture (not quite as extensive, but still amazing) that is on my computers.
So, total investment:
1. XBox - $150
2. Solderless Modchip - $56
3. 250 Gig HDD - $130
4. Blockbuster FlipCard - $50
Total $386
$386 for over 100 games plus a media center pc to boot. Now if I could get PVR functionality, I'd be in complete heaven

An Xbox with Xbox Media Center can't do PVR by itself yet but for playing MPEG 1/2/4 and virtually any audio it's great (any codec MPlayer can do). It can stream from SMB network shares, Internet, Replay TV and modified Tivos. Plays DVDs, DVD+/-R/Ws and CDs. Can lookup and download movie/album covers and gives a short review or IMDB rating. Skinable UI and can be booted in 20 seconds. Can output HDTV resolutions (although playback is still not where people would like it to be). Perfect HTPC just replace the fan.

Xbox Media Center That application alone is worth the $150 for an Xbox console.

Having gone to the trouble to build PVRs based on both MythTV and Freevo, I can say that while Freevo and Myth are fine accomplishments, they're not what you need for this.

The slickest thing I have seen so far is xbox media center. My many thanks to the developers for a dandy piece of work.

1 xBox: $180 (With a free Mech Assault)
1 DVD Remote: $30
1 Xenium: $55 (chip)

Having the most integrated "plays anything that mplayer plays" media/mame/psx/snes/xbox box on the block: Priceless :)

Uses Divx+AC3 files for great compression with minimal loss of picture quality.

Scales Divx video up to 720p for remarkable picture quality, which in many cases looks better than the original DVD. The PQ approaches HD in many cases.

Allows Dolby 5.1 AC3 optical pass-thru for true surround sound with no recompression of audio streams. The sound you hear is the sound on the original DVD.

Each compressed DVD movie is just over 1GB in size.

Compressed movies can be delivered to wireless clients anywhere in the home with standard 802.11b, with seamless playback.

Head-end server can be located in the basement or a closet to keep computer and fan noise away from your home theatre.

Also stores and catalogs your entire MP3 music library for listening to music from any client.

Outputs stereo audio sources (such as standard MP3 files) to both front and rear stereo channels in a surround setup, giving you output from all speakers in your surround setup, even if you're only listening to a stereo source.

Listen to Internet radio from any client.

The only disadvantage to my setup:

Not enough disk space to rip entire movies including menus in a lossless format. My setup can fully support reading .VOB files from the server, provided you have enough space to store them all.

Actually, I think it's pretty good. This is the hardware I had lying around to work with, most donated by my work:

1 Sun Ultra 5 360 mhz. workstation w/ 256 MB RAM and 9GB HD. (about $190 on eBay).

1 dual-channel differential PCI SCSI card, (about $20 on eBay).

1 Sun StorEdge D1000 with 10x 18GB SCSI hard drives, (about $130 for the array itself on eBay, then buy some Sun spud drive brackets and load up with your own SCSI drives).

1 Xbox, modded, with DVD remote kit, for each client.

You could get a much cheaper server for storage and all that by just building a PC clone and throwing a few 250 GB hard drives in it, but this hardware was free (except for the Xbox), so I used what I have.

Here are the installation steps:

1. Install Solaris 9 on the Ultra 5.

2. Use Solstice Disksuite to setup a RAID 5 metadevice spanning across all 10 18GB SCSI drives. Newfs the metadevice, end up with about 150 GB of space mounted under /bigdisk.

3. Setup Samba on the Ultra 5 and share out the /bigdisk partition in read-only to everyone and read-write to your ripping workstation.

4. Rip your DVDs in Divx format with AC3 audio (don't recompress the audio stream, because AC3 is already compressed and you want 5.1 surround, right?)

5. Save your .avi video files to the Samba server.

6. Mod your Xbox (use the 007 agent under fire savegame hack to avoid buying a modchip and cracking the case). If you want instructions on how to do this, check out the Tutorials section on this site.

7. Install XboxMediaCenter on your Xbox and set it up as the main dashboard.

8. Configure XBoxMediaCenter to point to your Video server using smb://username:password@servername/bigdisk or whatever you decided to name it.

9. Enjoy movie watching madness from any TV in your house.

1 used xbox: $150
1 cheapmod: $10
-or-
rented copy of "mech assault" or "007 agent under fire" plus memory card: $20
1 copy of xbox media center (visit #xbins on efnet to obtain this): priceless! (and free too!)

XBox Media Center (XBMC) will play VOB files across the network from machines sharing the files via SMB (regular windows networking) or 2 other xbox-only streaming protocols. XBMC also plays divx, xvid, mpeg, quicktime, realmedia, ogm, and other video codecs. throw in mp3/ogg support, streaming internet radio from shoutcast, a picutre viewer for your digital pics, and even weather updates from the weather channel.com and you have yourself a pretty cheap playback system.

oh yeah and it can play xbox games too.

xbox media center website
information on hacking the xbox (news, tutorials, and forums)
reliable source of cheap chips in the us

The XBMC native Xbox application is a lot more functional than anything I've seen for linux, and a whole lot faster on the Xbox. It is a customized version of mplayer built specifically to run on the Xbox - no underlying-RAM-hogging operating system needed. I'm fairly certain XBMC can play VOBs off a network drive, and using the Advanced A/V pack from Microsoft the progessive scan modes look very nice on an HDTV set.