Having been around the block many times on the HTPC front since 2000 from Mplayer through XBMC, Freevo, MythTV and countless others. Of the non-live TV playing

Having been around the block many times on the HTPC front since 2000 from Mplayer through XBMC, Freevo, MythTV and countless others. Of the non-live TV playing type, XBMC on the original Xbox was the best I'd ever used. It just worked, and some of the scripts were amazing. Sadly, 1080p HD wasn't quite doable on the little feller, so it was binned. My best live experience was without a doubt with MythTV. But despite it being awesome, the loose coupling of the code to the OS to the hardware meant that I'd routinely get crashes and problems, and an inevitable degradation of the platform which just wasn't wife friendly. I thought the original Apple TV was quite good, but it didn't handle flash or 720p mkv's well and was too underpowered for Boxee. Boxee was great until the 1.0 release. Currently I'm using a Mac Mini with EyeTV. No 10,000 foot view (as I don't use front row), just a dock with what I need on it. It's great. For non-live TV I have VLC, for live TV Eye-TV and anything I want for everything else. Stellarium and Google Earth are both incredible on a TV screen, I even do the occasional bit of photo processing in Aperture.