As dissatisfied as I am with the Boxee Box in its current state, I've come to a tough conclusion: it's the only solution out there for me.

The Roku, quite simply, DOES NOT do local media playback. They talk about it on their high-end model, but it isn't even implemented yet, and from everything I can tell, it'll only work using sneakernet, and that's simply not acceptable these days. Other than that, the Roku is everything else that I want out of this product category...

The Apple TV is very attractive, but it requires me to encode all the video I'm going to want to watch on it, and I don't want to be forced to run software on my computer (iTunes) in order to use a device like this.

So that leaves me with the Boxee Box. I'm going to tough it out and see if they can improve the software. Really, all I'm waiting for at this point is the Netflix app, and then I'll be fairly happy with the thing.