I strongly considered the Boxee Box a couple of years ago when I got the WD Live Hub. I played with the Boxee interface on my PC and just couldn't see the benefit of getting the Boxee when the WD came with 1TB of internal storage for $20 more. Haven't regretted it at all. The WDTV is just about the perfect the device for what we need. My only complaint is the lag in the interface and that it won't display the meta data from the Media Server software because it insists on using DLNA. A quicker SoC and/or an optimized firmware with the inclusion of UPNP support instead of DLNA would make it just about perfect.
On that note, I got my Raspberry Pi today. I threw the OpenELEC version of XBMC on it and quite frankly I am very impressed. Response time with Mezzmo is almost instantaneous, which pretty much verifies the lag issues are with the WDTV Live and not with the server. Just a couple more things for me to iron out with it (universal remote and local streaming) and I could see a couple more of these making their way into the house. It played everything back very well. Supported full 1080p BR Rips and surprisingly had no problem with DTS or AC3 audio tracks. I couldn't figure out how to shut off the subtitles, though, but I think that may just have been because of the crappy remote control program that I was using.
Do you have a plex setup to test the RaspPI against?
I don't, but Mezzmo is the same concept; media library management and automatically transcoding incompatible formats. I just load it up as a UPnP server in XBMC and it streams quite well. I haven't had to do any transcoding, yet, because the Pi running OpenELEC had no trouble playing back .h264 with .aac, .ac3 or .dts audio. So, I just ran it with the transcoder turned off. Just for fun, I set the device profile for Pi in Mezzmo to Amazon Kindle Fire because they don't have a Pi profile, yet. That makes sure that everything is transcoded to .h264/.aac which the Pi quite clearly supports. Played back Gladiator just fine.
I will pick up the VC-1 and MPEG-2 licenses in the next couple of days. Once I do that, I think I'll just run it with the transcoder turned off permanently. I may run into a music video or something in .flv that won't play, but I can't remember the last time I tried to play something like that. I may need to get a hold of the Mezzmo developers and have them build a profile that leaves VC-1, .h264, and MPEG-2 alone and just transcodes everything else.
I understand Boxee is a fork of XBMC, but the two are incomparable when it comes to usability and flexibility. XBMC has a lot more flexibility when it comes to add-ins and settings. Boxee takes a very "this is how it is" kind of setup that I GREATLY prefer. I've tried replacing my Boxee Box with a i5 XBMC machine and a RPi. It's simply not as intuitive or easy to use as Boxee got the the software to be before they were bought out.
That's why I still recommend the Boxee Box even though I know it's a "dead" product. Open the box, plug it in, specify your TV resolution, point it to network shares, start watching. Everything else is handled for you automatically.
That's not really the reason why. Everything I have is properly named. It's really just stupid stuff.
Let's take my last XBMC trial.
Installed it, pointed to directories, let it build the database, tried it out for a few days, no problems. Went to watch a movie. A Good Day to Die Hard. This was my first movie.
Subtitles. On everything. Ok, well, turn the subtitles off. I did that, eventually figuring out where it was. Oh wait, there's Russian speaking parts in this movie! I need subtitles. Ok, stop the movie (sorry, baby, I'm working on it!), have to go in to the settings and fiddle around. Eventually figure out a way for it to only show the subs during the Russian speaking parts. Start watching the movie again, everything looking fine. Russian speech, subtitle, oh my god why is the subtitle staying? Yes, the subtitle stayed on the screen until the next part that needed to be subtitled. At least that was bearable.
So, after watching, for shits & giggles, fired up Boxee Box, played the file and with NO INTERACTION FROM ME WHATSOEVER, it only showed subtitles during the Russian speaking parts and they came and went the way they're supposed to. And, yes, AGDtDH was the last thing I watched on that XBMC setup.
So that's why I keep coming back to Boxee Box, over and over again, no matter what else I try.
EDIT: How about this ridiculous XBMC quirk. Point it to your file shares, let it scrape to build you show library. Then, go to TV shows. Every single folder, regardless of if it actually has shows in it, shows up in the list. This requires you to scroll past shows that might have nothing to watch in order to get to things you might actually have. This is just ludicrous behavior. Fixable? Sure, by opening an XML file and editing it. What? That is cray-cray. That should be default behavior. If there are no episodes in a folder, then you don't need to list the show in the TV category.