Off-the-shelf there's nothing that comes close to what Boxee offers for local media, even with all its faults. Popcorn Hour's latest product, PopBox "looked" like it might be half-way decent, but like every other product they've released it in fact sucks very very badly and is missing so many basic playback features that it would be all but unusable. The Western Digital boxes are fine for playing back a single file out of a directory of files. But that's not what I'm looking for.

With Roll-Your-Own, there are more options, however I still don't think any other software out there has the finish and polish of Boxee. For instance, I haven't seen a skin for XBMC that I've liked yet - I can honestly say that all the time I've spent looking at XBMC has just left me completely underwhelmed and not impressed in the least. I haven't seen anything that I've liked at all about it. Plex for Mac OS, also based on XBMC has some potential, but it's still lacking.

Building out a box to run Plex or XBMC would still be at least a $400+ proposition as well. I already think Boxee Box is $50 too expensive.