Ok, fair enough. I brought up MPlayer just to make sure you knew the kind of performance I was talking about (expecting). I don't have the Boxee Box hooked up right now because I'm limited to a single HDMI input until I can connect my DVDO. Unfortunately I haven't been able to do that because the parents are in town and I've been doing some renovations while my dad is available to help. So far I've put up a mezzanine in the garage and today I've started ripping out the carpet and baseboards in the dining and living rooms, getting ready to install (solid) bamboo flooring tomorrow.

So yes, I'm using you as my testing proxy.

If there's a buffering issue, it really needs to be fixed/addressed. I expect at least the same performance I see in SageTV using their HD Theater box. IMO, this issue is present in Boxee because they've concentrated most of their efforts on internet content. Which brings me to my next point.

It was brought up in the Boxee forum that perhaps we aren't the target Boxee customers. Boxee is primarily a project to play internet content. Secondary, and with 1.0 I'd say far behind that, is playing your local media. That probably worked out without too much fuss while it was a beta software-only project that geeks used, but it isn't going to fly with a lot of consumers jumping on board for the first time. I'm glad they're responding and finally seeing that local content needs to be front and center.

In addition to scraped metadata for hollywood content, I'd also really like to see an easy way to index and present self-generated content. Now that I have an iPhone I'm shooting a lot more video than I ever have, primarily of my daughter. It's much more convenient than using my wife's Canon digicam and infinitely more convenient than using a video-only product I don't own.

Anyway, I'm still putting a lot of hope into Boxee because I just don't see anyone else stepping up to the plate any time soon with something that hits all the important points dead-on. The consoles are all a write-off for this purpose using built-in media support. Apple will always be off pushing their own content. No one else has an established software platform and I can't see someone springing out of the woodwork with something completely new in the short-term.