I've lived with the homebuilt HTPC for just over a week now.

I knew when I bought it that I was probably too early with the ATI drivers. After trying to install every ATI-related driver I could find, the main FGLRX binary is still the best so far on Gutsy Gibbon. I'm hoping that the opensource RadeonHD driver will be better in the end, for what I want to do with it. I'm not interested in gaming or fast 3d acceleration. I'm interested in video.

The current lack of xv support for the x1250 integrated is troublesome resulting in the CPU having to perform a lot more than I'd like it to. I can't figure out if the x1250 actually supports xv and it's the drivers that don't or if the hardware itself doesn't support it.

Sometimes I can the system to work with opengl overlay on, sometimes it just stays on a blank screen on boot. When it does, it tends to crash Mplayer after 20 minutes.

I recommend Envy for anyone having trouble installing the ATI restricted drivers.

So now I'm left with watching at a lower resolution (which I doubt would solve some of the problems with 1080p files anyway) and waiting for the drivers to catch up with the components, or buy a cheap nvidia PCI card such as the 5200 to keep me going for a while. I'm just against waste.