I've been wanting to get an actual dedicated media center for the house for a while. I've tried lots of home-brew solutions that ended up being suboptimal for various reasons. Note that I'm not looking for a DVR, just a way to stream my huge collection of amazingly legal media I keep on a Linux box in my basement.

To date I've tried MythTV, Freevo, Elisa and a few others I can't recall. MythTV and Freevo were nice except they felt like they were primarily DVR software with things like music added as an afterthought (and this is actually the case). Elisa would have been pretty awesome except it crashed frequently and consistently kept the CPU utilization of my dual Xeons at 100%. Also, I wasn't entirely happy with my hardware. I had a Shuttle for a while, but ended up giving it away and most of the replacements I came up with were too bulky and loud for the living room.

Then I learned about XBMC. This is a great bit of software. It's pure media center with no pretentions of being a DVR. It has a nice interface. I also learned that it runs on Linux, Windows and OSX. And in fact, it can run on an Apple TV.

When I learned that the Apple TV was only $229, I decided to shell out for one. After all, it comes with TV-out (HDMI and component), a remote, 802.11n and a very nice form-factor. It does lack a couple of things (a DVD drive being an obvious one), but I wouldn't use it anyway (I'd either use my plain ole Panasonic DVD player or just rip the DVD on my laptop anyway). It does have one baffling quirk: no power button of any sort - you have to yank the power cord (which is somewhat resistant to being removed).

First off, the Apple TV software by itself is basically just a glorified front-end to iTunes Store. The only free content you can easily get to is YouTube. Not very compelling. I'm fairly certain the reason Apple prices it so low is that they hope to make their money back from content sales.

Anyway, installing XBMC is a snap (the trickiest part is coming up with a USB thumbdrive that is compatible... I had two that weren't and two that were). You also need a box running OSX (I borrowed my neighbor's iBook).

XBMC doesn't replace Frontrow (or whatever Apple calls it), rather it just adds itself as a menu item (although it appears that any updates from Apple will also uninstall it).

Once XBMC is in place, you can easily stream video and music to it from a UPnP server (I use mediatomb). It's got a really nice interface and only crashes occasionally (and predictably on particular files).

Overall, I find the combination to be the best price/performance/feature package I've used to date.

FOLLOWUP:

Ok, I'm going to completely reverse my previous position. After having this thing for several months, I'd recommend buying something else, notably something with a fan. For another $100 you can get something with twice the horsepower and better cooling.

Here's my complaints:

1. The Apple TV constantly overheats and reboots without warning.
2. Apple updates must be disabled or Apple will thoughtfully wipe out all your customizations.
3. It's not fast enough for HD content.
4. Apple remote has a weak signal and short battery life.