How to Homebuilt Multimedia PC With HDMI?

I built one of these myself and it took about 3 hours including the installation of the Operating System.
The key component however is this.

As you can see this is a Remote control which uses a USB receiver. There are many models available and I got mine from Amazon.com for $8. No drivers are required for this remote and several of the buttons are programmable.
You don't program them from the remote though. You create a shortcut to whatever it is you need to open on your desktop. That shortcut is then edited to open with a command set already programmed into the button. Genius huh? There is also a mouse built into this remote that functions pretty nicely and includes the right and left buttons.
My rig was built with a Dell GX280 $75

Which includes a low power ATI X1300 PCI X-Press video card with DVI out that I bought on Ebay for $13.

This card is one of the few PCI X-Press models that won't kill your power supply(No Fan). My GX280, as you can see from the photo is a SFF (Small Form Factor) PC, and as such has a very small power supply. This means that I cant use a power hungry card, while at the same time I need a card that will perform well in 3-D applications as well as streaming video from such sites as Hulu, Veoh, Youtube, TV.Com, and Fancast.net to name a few.
The real magic, however is that this card is capable of delivering 720i/p and 1080i/p resolutions to my HD-TV.

Yes thats my model.Close enough anyway.
One gig of ram will work, but 2 gigs is better for streaming. Since this PC is so small (About Phone Book Size) it fits in any entertainment center with ease. You can also add a TV tuner, but this is a waste of time since most HD-TV sets include ATSC/QAM/NTSC in their own tuner. If you want to record Live Video, pause live TV etc though, a PC-TV tuner will be the way to go. This essentially makes the PC a Tivo and DVR since you can digitally record HD Video, as well as schedule your recordings. At this point you may be asking yourself how I got that DVI port to play on an HDMI input. Here is the last item you need for that.

This DVI to HDMI cable sells for $20 on Ebay, and works perfectly on my TV. The one thing it won't do however, is play audio. That is because the Video card has no Audio chip for the HDMI cable to receive. You will be using a standard Headphone to RCA cable for that.

This simply hooks up from the speaker out on the PC to the audio input closest to the HDMI input.
The result is a multimedia PC that anybody can afford!