If you can wait, I have a new recommendation. Boxee Box from Dlink. It has an excellent interface and will ship with what looks like a terrific BlueTooth remote.

http://www.boxee.tv/box

I'm not a fan of the angled "box" dimensions of the unit itself, but at least it's very small an unobtrusive. All my components are being hidden inside cabinets anyway. Oh, one possible caveat for some people... It's HDMI-only for video.

You can try the Boxee software right now for Windows or Mac OS if you want to see whether or not you'll like the UI. The beauty of Boxee is that it will automatically fetch movie and series posters/covers and descriptions if your files are named somewhat intelligibly.

Since making the recommendation for the WD product, I have had the chance to set one up and play around with it quite a bit. It's got the better UI compared to the other low-priced products of this type, but it still has some niggles. The main one for me was a lack of search ability when browsing over the network. If you connect a local drive it generates a DB for all the content which allows searching.

Also since that recommendation, the Popcorn Hour guys have released (or at least announced and previewed) and new lower priced product with a brand new UI which looks quite good. It was conceived by the designer of the Moxi UI (from Digeo).

I've been playing around with the Boxee beta myself and so far I'm strongly considering picking one up when it comes out this summer. I currently use a SageTV box for both recorded TV and file-based playback, but Boxee is so pleasant to use that I'd start using it for all my movies and file-based TV episodes.


EDIT: The Boxee Box will be powered by an NVIDIA Tegra chipset.