I'm thinking about networking my house for media

[Ecrofirt]

It looks like Nikki and I will likely be moving into our own home soon, and my mind is already ablaze with ideas for how to geek the house out.

First and foremost, I'm probably going to get a 24 port switch (either 10/100, or 10/100/1000) and wire the house with Cat 5 cable. Once that's done, I want to get the house set up as a multimedia hub.

Here's what I mean:
I've been using XBMC for years to stream movies from my PC to my TV via my Xbox. Now I'm doing it in HD with my 360. What I'd like to do is get a RAIDed file server set up at the house that I can dump all of my media to. From there I want to build 2 home theater PCs and connect everything to my HDTV via HDMI.

I suppose that I'll expand on this a bit when I get home from work later, as I still have a few things to work out and a few questions to ask.

Any of you guys or gals do anything like this at your homes?

[Ecrofirt]

So yea, anyhow! Here's my idea in a more laid out manner:
 * Run Cat5 to the bedrooms and TV room initially, and expand that to the whole house as time permits.
 * Get the house set up for secured wireless access throughout
 * Set up a file server with 1TB or so of RAIDed data storage initially, and share the data to our PCs

I further plan to:
 * Build some media center PCs, specifically for the rooms with HDTVs. I'd like something a bit more robust than an Xbox 360 for streaming movies / music / pictures.

If possible:
 * I'd like to get capture cards in the home theater PCs so I can record things. Do they make ones that allow you to record HD content? I'd imagine they only allow you to record non-encrypted HD content.
 * I'd like to find good media center software for the PCs. I know XBMC is out for PCs now. Is it good?

[Rman]

I heard boxee is a great solution for streaming content, like netflix and such.  It's only OSX and Linux at the moment, though.

[Ecrofirt]

I downloaded XBMC and am testing it out on my laptop. It seems a little bit clunky on the PC switching between menus, and for the life of me I can't properly get it to open in Windowed mode. I'm also getting nowhere fast attempting to connect to a samba share on one of the other PCs in the house. I can connect to the same share via XBMC on my Xbox without a problem, but on the PC I'm getting prompted for a username/password before I can even browse PCs in my workgroup. I've tried every password I can think of, but nothing will let me connect to the workgroup. Strangely, I have no problem connecting to my other PC if I connect to a fileshare on it as a network drive and then browse that in XBMC.

[Mupepe]

My apartment came prewired with Cat-5 cables.  It made it really awesome for when my AT&T Uverse was installed.  No long ass cables all over the place. 

[Napoleonthechimp]

I'm not much of a mac person but it might be worth looking into using a mac mini as a media center computer. However, you'd need to buy eyeTV to get it to accept live TV sources and also install Plex (which is a cool XBMC variant for the mac only - which doesn't yet integrate eyeTV fully, but they're working on that). It's got wireless n, bluetooth and all that good stuff in a small form factor.

EDIT: Oh yeah, you can also use an iphone or ipod touch as a really cool remote for it.