I have some
china branded box and it is actually kinda awesome. Plays EVERYTHING you can imagine, and the inputs are crazy - internal HDD, external SATA (supporting HDD or any optical drive you want) USB 3.0 (you can also plug a wifi adapter into it), ethernet, SD reader, etc. I got one with a built in tuner. I think it cost about $150. It uses a Realtek chip like most of them, not the latest one though.
It also has a Youtube browser (and various china video services I don't use) and a bittorrent downloader, but I never use that. I got the one with a terrestrial HD tuner, so I use it as a PVR (my wife likes to watch all those stupid TVB shows)
The non tuner one would be about $100, so if you know anyone over here it might be worth considering. No Netflix though. I'm pretty happy with it, even if the interface kinda sucks.