Saturn,
Yeah I lost one VB50HRTV after a cable outage (took out whole neighborhood, and a few cable boxes, including my box). They seem to be kinda delicate as it did not affect another scaler I have. I forgot about the MSI card, that is another one that a lot of ppl are talking about as it has all the same chips as the others I mentioned. The only difference I have read in the cards are the various grounding paths on the board and how much noise they pick up.
As for the remote situation, take a look at Girder and Girder supported IR receivers/transmitters. I am currently using a USB-UIRT which as the name states a USB device, that is both a receiver and transmitter with a jack for external emitters (such as Xantech). It works great, Girder is *very* powerful, but has a learning curve. With this you could say use a universal remote or pronto if you have one to talk to the computer and control various aspects (especially with the pronto as the interface is as you design it)
If you are not going to bother with PVR activities I highly recommend taking a look at DScaler, specifically 4.1.5 and greater as it supports the newer conexant chips, its free all you have to lose is a little time. The various deinterlacing routines are pretty nice, specifically the Tomsmocomp series. When I was using it I was using greedy high motion which was pretty nice most of the time. That and the various sharpening and noise reduction filters are nice, and perhaps the second most important one after deinterlacing method is the Judder terminator which is a life saver if you dont have a device that can handle a refresh that is a multiple of the source framerate.
As for your recommendation on the newer CX chips, yeah that is the opinion of many right now, the Bt8x8 chips just couldnt make me happy (majority of previous generation cards are based on this chip). The H3D I use now has that chip as well as the Faroudja chip for deinterlacing.
If you are not familar with AVS forums, take a look. They have a whole section dedication to HTPC's. Traffic is quite high and lots of knowledge in there. That is where I first heard about Axiom speakers, in the Speakers forum.
-pd
