My Barriers to Geeking Out with Myth

My real barrier here is time, there's just not enough of it to do all the research and all the fiddling that I want to do. So I'm hoping some stray MythTV guru will happen upon this blog entry and solve my problems for me.

I've set up a Myth box (acting as both backend and frontend). Currently I'm running Suse 10.2 and I have my video and audio cards connected to my entertainment center (TV and stereo receiver) via a long string of S-Video and AV cables. It's not the best setup - I actually need the cables to be about 6 feet longer to actually be something I could permanently use without clotheslining people who walk into my office. But that's not the problem I'm trying to solve right now.

My two primary problems are:

1. I want to be able to control my PC from the family room. I want to be able to use the mouse, arrow keys and the Enter key at a bare minimum - but any solution that offers a full keyboard would also be cool. The solution absolutely must must must support Linux. Now the hard part: The computer is out of sight in another room about 30 feet away. Any solution will have to be able to connect to that box from that distance. For instance, standard IR solutions would require the IR receiver (mounted on top of the entertainment center) to be able to reach my PC in another room - that's one long USB cable! Bonus points if I don't have to use a soldering gun...
   [Update 2007-03-02: As noted here, I ended up purchasing the SnapStream Firefly PC Remote which so-far works beautifully.]
2. I'm having an audio sync issue with MPlayer. The video starts out playing normally and then eventually the audio drifts away from the video within a minute or two. I think it only happens on videos that I captured from my VCR and turned into MPEGs. I've found that adjusting the -fps option can help, but this has to be done with every file, and I'm not sure it's a permanent fix. Also, if I backup or fast-forward in MPlayer, the audio immediately gets back in sync with the video. Anyone experience this? Anyone know an easy fix? Anyone know of another command-line video player that I can hook Myth up to? This problem does not happen to me when I try PowerDVD in Windows...
   [Update 2007-02-19: I installed Xine and used that - I haven't seen an audio-video sync issue yet, so this problem is now solved!]

Though I don't relish another device that must be powered on 24x7, I think a basic, networked front-end PC using a entertainment center form-factor would probably be the best match for my ideal setup (solving both the cabling and remote-control issues, to a degree). But it would have to be almost an order-of-magnitude cheaper than this, quiet and green-friendly. Any suggestions down that route would be appreciated also.