Media Machines

I have had a Magic Gate MG-35 Media Drive for about 3 years - it will stream over a network or play from the hard drive I added, and it works very well. It might not play MKV but it will play everything else - including ISO's which I find handy. I might upgrade when I feel the need to move from component to HDMI and maybe MKV's - it does everything else including dig coax and Optical out which is useful for me as I don't yet have a HDMI audio capable amp. Its cheap, simple and effective, and my girlfriend uses it all the time.

Along with a modded Apple TV (mostly used for podcasts and streaming of itunes music, yes I know I'm a geek) it gets used all the time - and with stuff that is on the hard drive its ideal for taking away on holidays with a backpack of cables to make sure it will plug into TV of any vintage. I'm sure there are a heap of other similar options, like Popcorn, Dvico Tivx and the Western Digital that work as well if not better for most that have been overlooked. And also the media extenders have been ignored - like the ones from D-Link and Netgear...

PS I use a 85mb Ethernet over Power adapter and it works fine, streams video smoothly as if it was coming of the local hard drive no matter the size file.

IMO PC are the best media machines around hands down, but since consoles are included in the mix, the PS3 is the worst by far, it can't even find our music library, can't stream avi video from a flashdrive, can't communicate with our Sonos set up (knows it's there but that's about it). The 360 on the other hand picked everything else up straight away to the exception of Sonos thanks to the Media Center extender I guess.
If you're looking for a heart to your digital media world, choose a media center PC.

TVersity and Windows Media player are fine if your stuck with Windows. For Linux I use fuppes or mediatomb. Both will happily transcode on the fly, are free and do a rather good job (but i prefer fuppes).
I always liked a hacked x-box for networked media, especially how it reads and decodes .rar files and can browse network shares, however no HD, and its ugly as sin so its replaced with a PS3, some Homeplugs (Zyxel 200Mbs) and a media server. I have never had an issue which cannot be fixed with some trascoding trickery.

One question is how Eco friendly are all these media machines? Yo should not just think of the power consumption of the device but what about the power consumed by your PC/Mac being used to rip and transcode your source material? The only real Eco solution is to have no local (home) storage and to stream (or stream to buffer) all you require from central servers (such as the Apple iTunes store) thereby saving a lot of energy! If you also never bought the DVD or CD in the first place you would save on the energy used in their production and transport.

Maybe Apple with their Apple TV have stumbled upon a real 'green' solution?