I’d been living under Apple TV hegemony for about two years I bought an early 40GB model, upgraded it to 80GB, and then hacked it. When hacked, the Apple TV is actually useful. Hacked it was, in short, one of the easiest ways to get video on my NAS or networked Macs to my TV. Unhacked it’s sort of like a really nice guy who works in insurance sales: you want to like him but he keeps trying to sell you stuff and he’s really boring.
Slowly but surely, however, the ATV hit its limit. I ran out of disk space and didn’t want to upgrade and XBMC was choking on larger files. The device itself was as hot as a griddle most of the time and I worried that at some point I’d have a bricked device on my hands. I went on a quest for a networked device to do two things: stream audio from multiple sources, including my library of MP3s, and to play video from a NAS drive over the network. If it could play Netflix that would be gravy. I put a number of devices to the test and have come up with a real winner.
