With Ayanami being noisy and all, I was looking around for a compact and low-noise media center system. The unit would then be used like a true media center, with remote control and all, and as a PVR (similar to Ayanami but without the noise and including an RC).
After a bit of shopping and adjustments to the proposals of JCM Concepts, I managed to compile a nice system: Tsuruya.

The components were specifically selected for small form and low power usage. The original selected case was a mini-tower, but I was looking for something more compacter and stackable. Eventually, I came across the Antec Black Fusion 430, which is not exactly compacter but is very stackable (look at the pictures to see). Moreover, the case was specifically designed for these kind of platforms, and thus, have additional hardware (LCD display, IR sensor) built in. CPU is a light one, and there's not much RAM in it but it's only for multimedia and not heavy duty processing. The TV tuner is a Hauppauge PVR-500 which has dual TV tuners. Although digital TV is available where I live, I do not yet use it as the perks of digital TV are somewhat compensated by the functionality of the computer.

The original OS and applications were inherited from Ayanami: Gentoo Linux running MythTV. This setup ran quite alright for a good while. Unfortunately, MythTV support on Gentoo was starting to deteriorate, and moreover, due to restrictions on the source for the TV guide (screen grabbing was no longer allowed), the TV guide no longer worked, which was a hassle to get proper recordings. From a quality point of view, MythTV did a good job but the events made it less pleasant.

With the coming of Windows 7, I started tampering with Windows Media Center. If it were only available for Vista, I wouldn't have bothered. But the beta of Windows 7 looked very promising, so why not give its Media Center a go.
It didn't take long to decide: Media Center implemented a lot of the features MythTV had as well but with less than half of the trouble it took to get it all configured. There are a few drawbacks in Windows Media Center: files are not standard MPEG2; Live TV is also not automatically recorded (and thus cannot be reviewed afterworths). But the advantages do outweigh these little things.
As an additional bonus, the built-in IR sensor and LCD panel are working because of the fact it's Windows (and there were only Windows drivers for it). Before, I used the USB IR sensor included with my MCE remote. But the SoundGraph iMon hardware is fully compatible with MCE remotes.

On a hardware level, there were not much changes. The motherboard had a ATI X1150 on board, but the troublesome bugger did not have proper Xv video-overlay in Linux. As the motherboard did have a PCIe x16 slot available, I purchased a very light-weight nVidia GeForce 6200LE with passive cooling. The 3D performance of the card were virtually zero, but it had a proper Xv video-overlay, so hardware-accelerated video playback was not a problem.
When I switched to Windows, I tried out the onboard card again to see whether it was any better in Windows, but no chance: the video playback was choppy, and because of WMC's 3D rendering and lack of it with the ATI, WMC did not even start. The 6200LE also proved inadequate: while video playback was fair outside of WMC, it was quite the contrary within WMC, in large part due to the required 3D capabilities. It did work, but rather choppy and all. So, I started looking for another card. At work, we still had an nVidia Quadro NVS 295 laying about. This card is at the bottom of the nVidia Quadro "food chain", has dual monitor support and passive cooling. I knew the card was capable of at least a bit of 3D as I had it in my computer at work and ran Condor on it without a hitch. And as expected, when trying it out, the card performed very adequately. The card itself was not very cheap, I found it was worth the money anyway.
The dual monitor support added another dimension as I could now have two monitors on my desk, connecting both using VGA (D-SUB) to the media center; the DVI of the monitors would be connected to other devices so I could easily switch to whatever I needed. The media center's display would then be set up as mirroring, allowing me to select which monitor I wished to see TV and such, on, and use the other monitor for other stuff (my laptop is connected to a DVI port on one monitor, my gaming pc to the DVI of the other monitor; both monitors are capable of on-the-fly input source selection).