I’ve been playing a bit with the free media pc platforms. Here is a lay down so far:

• Effort to get up and going (from easiest): XBMC, Freevo, MythTV
• Maturity (from least): Freevo, XBMC, MythTV
• Feature set (from smallest): Freevo, XBMC, MythTV

All three platforms are geared toward dedicated systems. Getting them running on a separate screen of a shared system is awfully hard. I’ll keep pluging at it but so far the winner for me is MythTV, simply because it uses Qt rendering that is a lot more friendly toward shared station setup (in particular VNC and keyboard focus) than the full screen modes in either Freevo or XBMC. Freevo seems not to be able to release the mouse to the other screen at all,while XBMC would, assuming the mouse is disabled and the mouse jailer is running before XBMC is started. More on this later…

PS.The mythbuntu package is a must! It helped immensly to get MythTV up and running.