We were big fans of the AppleTV, mostly because of the easy UI, good podcast support, and its ability to rent movies from the iTunes store. My biggest complaint with the AppleTV was that I had to convert video to an AppleTV-friendly format from time to time. I also wasn’t a huge fan of having to have all my media entered into iTunes in order to play it on the AppleTV. Sure, I could hack the AppleTV to make it do what I want (and for awhile I did), but in the end it wasn’t quite the right solution.

Enter Plex, a OS X-specific fork of the XBox Media Center project. Plex gives me a very attractive user interface, the ability to index my media (with the nifty ability to download TV & movie artwork and music), an extensible plugin architecture, and streaming support for sites like Hulu (assuming you can work around their geographical detection system. Ahem.)

I’ve put together a quick review of Plex, which you can view below:

(thanks to Jeff for hosting the file!)

Gizmodo has an excellent article on how to hack your Apple TV (it’s easy to do, doesn’t void your warranty, and is easy to undo if you don’t like it). It was a little harder getting Hulu to work properly – if you aren’t located in the United States, you generally can’t watch Hulu videos … at least, not without taking a “creative approach” to the problem (hint: it helps to know someone with a US server, and how to configure OpenVPN).

Now that everything is up and running, I don’t see why I would ever bother with cable TV again. I have access to NBC, ABC and CBS television shows, tons of movies, and for Canadian content we get the CBC in high def over the air.

I’ll try and put a video overview of the system together and post it sometime in the next couple days.