[winson604]

Originally Posted by mos_skeeto

I own/use plex, apple tv, wdtv and chromecast.

Chromecast works well if you're network is really good. I have a walls between my tv and router so when I beam from my couch it goes from living room > den > living room and it's crap. I also find that videos don't really cache well so it's not like you can hit pause for a few seconds and let it queue up. Theres plug-ins you can get for Chrome (desktop) that lets you play pretty much anything.

Apple TV is awesome for buying, renting and watching web-friendly videos (ex: youtube, netflix). For random stuff you download off the web its awful.

Plex as above poster mentioned is my favourite stream option. Great performance over the network and fancy menus.

What I use is none of the above. I hate streaming. (insert grupmy cat gif here). I got a wdtv media player from Costco and I go old school with a usb hard drive (2 terabytes accessible over the network). It keeps my computer hard drive empty and everything plays easily with 5.1 surround with no fuss and I can take it to a friends house. The only pain is transferring stuff over. XBMC would also work for this purpose.

Likewise i hate streaming anything. I think I might go WDTV route. Does it handle almost every format you throw at it?