mini-itx system

I made a few rubbish purchases; 1) I bought a SATA hard drive for someone who required an IDE one...durrr 2) I bought DRAM when I needed DDR2-RAM...fool! Anyway rather than try to sell these two items I decided to try and build something, so I also purchased a mini-itx motherboard ( a jetway j2f7...I think ) this was around £85-90 from mini-itx.com, a very good website for seeing other peoples projects and get ideas and kit. I spent a further £45 on a case and psu, then using a slimline dvd-rom/cd-rw from a broken laptop I was ready. To start with I just wanted to check that everything worked so I installed windows on the system. This worked so I then decided that I could turn the unit into a nice little PVR, this was before they started to drop in price. In order to play dvd's I used a copy of power-dvd and in order to watch dvds on my tv using the unit I had to install dvd43, as for some strange reason a copyrighted dvd won't play...go figure. So that I could use the unit to play all of my dvds from the hdd I used a piece of software called autoGK and another called DVDShrink this did take around 12hrs+ to rip and compress a single DVD which means to convert my whole collection would take a million years. Around the same sort of time I was experimenting with Linux so I wondered if there were any similar programs on there, well shocker there is and its called AcidRip and that took just 2 hours to turn a 1hr30minute dvd to a 700Mb avi file FANTASTIC. Since then I bought a cheap £20 usb video capture device from KWorld, who I since found out are a cheap Korean hardware manufacturer that tend to sell stuff in India-- or so I've been lead to believe. Anyway it took a while to get the video capture to work on ubuntu 7.10 but now it does finally work in mplayer, turns out the GStreamer drivers aren't mature enough to use it but the xine stuff did work whoopee. I might write a little project build guide up and submit it to mini-itx.com as possibly the cheapest PVR project ever. I have also discovered DynDNS and have decided that the media device can be made into a simple energy efficient server, and now I have just discovered that it is ideally suited for being a vlc server :) so I am still experimenting