A home. Theatre. PC.  How awesome an idea is this?

Lenovo’s taking its first steps into the still somewhat burgeoning home theatre PC market by offering up its IdeaCentre Q700 and its complementary model the IdeaCentre D400, both of which is set to cost about five hundred bucks.

The IdeaCentre Q700 is designed, by the look of it, to take advantage of virtually every possible kind of media that’s been produced in the last ten years. It comes with one of three Intel Core 2 Duo processors, a maximum of two terabytes (as in, one thousand gigabytes) and the capacity for plenty more storage.  Get this–this monster comes with eight USB ports and an eSATA port for an external hard drive.  This is a clear step up over the earlier version we’ve discussed, so they must’ve taken that bit about “lackluster specs” seriously.

It can support 1080p video and graphics, not to mention 7.1 channel surround sound, and also offers ethernet and wi-fi capability for streaming video.  And just in case there’s any TV you actually want to watch, a TV tuner is also available.

That, folks, is a LOT.  A lot of options, a lot of storage, a lot of everything.  Considering that a blank DVD holds roughly four gigs of material, that means the two terabyte hard drive by itself can hold about five hundred DVDs worth of material.  With EIGHT USB ports and an eSATA, you could conceivably bump that up another eighteen terabytes, bringing the whole system up to somewhere in the neighborhood of–brace yourself–FOUR THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED DVDs.

Assume ninety minutes average per DVD, and that means you’re staring at almost seven thousand hours of video.  If you did absolutely nothing but watch movies, eschewing even sleep, you’d spend two hundred and ninety one days, plus sixteen hours, watching movies and never repeat the same one.

Of course, you’d probably have a hard time finding a way to put all those videos on your hard drive, especially since trafficking in the software to transfer them is still illegal….