What it takes to have a home with a True Media Center

I have been using shared media in my home with tuner control since 2005. Shared media with a media player since 1999. The Industry has finally come to the forefront for families and houses to do this easily. In otherwords, you don't have to be a computer professional to achieve central media control for your home. I'll go through the process that I have created for my own home media center and you can glean from that what you will.

What this is:
The reason I'm doing this I have found many of my friends and family are starting the process of creating media centers for their collections and I am giving them the lessons learned from my experiences. I figured why not help anyone else that is looking into this process. So follow along and maybe we'll all learn from each other.

What this is NOT:
The end all to all potential configurations or setups for hosting media in your house! This is only how I have done it and I am sure there are other ways to do the same thing. This is how I have done it and feel it is very productive, and financially attainable. Very Subjective here... so if you have opinions, please keep them short and productive.