Ok, I'm feeling a little surly with all this news about Boxee hacking up their UI. Lately a lot of companies have been totally screwing the pooch. SageTV for instance took a good working, but somewhat outdated UI and came out with something that just looks terrible and amateurish (as well as being a copy of an XBMC skin). My spider-sense seems to have been on the money. I said it early on... Anyone who implements a media system that doesn't ignore articles simply doesn't have their eye on the ball.

A lot of people have been complaining that this reeks of a bait-and-switch, a slap in the face of everyone who has helped beta test the software on their Mac and PCs. They had millions of dollars of capital to put the software out and this is what they have to show for all the years of development. Maybe they heated their offices with a cash-burning stove.

XBMC looks like crap - every single skin looks terrible. Below terrible IMO. Besides, it runs only on large, power-hungry and !LOUD! boxes.

Boxee takes the XBMC core (all the open source libraries for codec, etc) and marries it to a metadata scraping engine to pull posters and descriptions, then it (used to) roll this all up in a very concise and usable UI.

Now it sounds like they're getting rid of their biggest strength, the UI. The metadata is useless without the UI, and the codec support is absolutely trivial to support elsewhere because it's open source and even if you wanted to or needed to build a non-open product, you have a nice selection of quite powerful integrated SoC to handle every HD resolution and codec you want to throw at a box.

I need a good system for playback and display of LOCAL TV shows and movies. Hopefully something to play back home movies at some point as well, but that's not of paramount importance right now. I don't really care at all about YouTube or any online content whatsoever, but it's a bonus I suppose. Yeah, I'm probably not the customer for Boxee.

If Boxee is as bad as Matt is describing it, I'm returning my units, sending a letter to Boxee to let them know why I returned them and I'll just go without. I'm not gong to dedicate any form of PC to this task, that's just too 1999. I'll remain a curmudgeon about this whole product class if I have to.

Putting Boxee on a Mac mini or any other machine isn't going to help in the long term because version 1.0 software will be coming to those versions as well. I mean, you can run the old interface if you're fine with a six month old beta.

The AppleTV hardware will completely wipe out the competition if it gets suitably hacked. Even though it doesn't currently support 1080p, with some decent mods it could be a lot better than anything else out there. I think it's going to sell more units than anything else even without any hacks or mods. It won't be iPod or iPhone nor iPad numbers, but they'll be higher than Boxee by at least a couple of orders of magnitude and they should be higher than Google's solution (from all supplier combined). Keep in mind that I think the stock Apple TV is crap, generally useless. I have no intention of ever buying or renting video from Apple, so that part (the biggest part of this product) doesn't appeal to me.