The PS3 has goofy, unintuitive controls optimized for expensive gaming, and no real browser (it does have a ludicrously useless one). Only our teenage son really likes it, so I’d say it’s only a good choice within its target demographics. Very good quality blue-ray and DVD playback, strong CEC and good sound. Nice hardware and very stable software in a stupidly curvaceous, unstackable chassis.
The Roku 2 XS 1080p was admirably small and had an interesting wii-like controller, but was primarily oriented towards pay services and annoyingly non-trivial to set up without entering payment information. The software wasn’t fantastically stable but didn’t crash constantly either. No keyboard, no optical drives, very much a one-trick pony, but given the small size and reasonable cost that seems very reasonable. Nonetheless we gave it away to relatives who wanted to use it for Netflix. When we had it, it was primarily used for playing Angry Birds on the big screen, because its other functions were all duplicated by other devices.
The logitech Revue ($99 Google TV) would have been a fantastic box, with a great controller, but Logitech totally bungled the product (even worse than they are currently bungling their formerly excellent Squeezebox line of devices) by treating their customers with a blend of paternalistic contempt and open distrust. The company actively worked to prevent end-users from vastly improving the device for them (I would have given them a power-off feature, others were developing work-arounds for network content blocking). I don’t want to talk about it any more, the idiocy and self-destructiveness of Logitech’s behavior still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They could have revolutionized TV if they could just have treated their users with a little human respect.
The home-built mythTV box required constant attention to resolve issues involved in running a rapidly developing program on a rapidly developing OS. I tried it with separate head and back ends, with Fedora, with Ubuntu, with Mediabuntu, even with CentOS and couldn’t achieve my goal of a box that would “just work” efficiently and securely for a decade without expert management (I routinely achieve that goal with servers and PCs running various OSes). That being said, MythTV is a superb system and an admirable achievement, and if you enjoy regularly tinkering with your hardware and software you will love it. I wish I had time for it. DVD works with fluendo or DeCSS, no blu-ray though (at least when I was still playing with it).
Every standalone media center blu-ray player I could find had Java under the hood, which is a detriment given my goal of secure, low-maintenance use over very long periods of time. Netflix and similar streaming usually strong out of the box. Many of them do not have wired ethernet connections, which is stupid since you don’t carry them around, so why waste precious wireless bandwidth? Their controls are based on TV remote controls and are thus horrible for typing, so web interactivity is painful. But they are fairly cheap, so if you aren’t concerned about waste stream issues and technology recycling, you could certainly do worse than just buying a new one every time the old one’s software support rots away.
Windows media center on Windows is quite good; I’ve noticed you’ll see fewer commercials on the Daily Show and other mass media products than you do with an android-based system, which makes me think Microsoft is paying a tithe. Blu-ray and DVD are no big deal because Microsoft is definitely paying a tithe. A windows system is expensive compared to less capable options and the Microsoft interfaces prior to Windows8 do not adapt well to the big screen. Microsoft products have reasonably long and very well defined life cycles, but tend to need many lengthy update-and-reboot cycles that don’t fit well with media center use when they are new, which is annoying (until they reach maturity and the updates recede to a more ignorable level). Again, based on purely functional arguments (ignoring arguable aesthetics, cost of a good controller and sociopolitical context) you could certainly do worse than just buying a windows box and sticking it under your TV.
That’s all I’ve got on media streaming; I won’t speculate on stuff I haven’t owned (like Apple TV or Boxee) or haven’t extensively used yet (Chromecast, although I can say it’s another wireless hog).
