The media server hooked to my big sony bravia in the living room has been running mythtv for awhile now, though my wife has never been a big fan of its UI. In fact, she hasn't asked to use it. Ever. She prefers the ease of use of Web based UIs from places like hulu (though I have the Hulu Desktop installed too) and Comedy Central.
To make matters worse, my recent upgrades to the current versions of MythVideo have made it impossible to serve up the video files via either nfs or streamed. I start a movie and it takes far too long to start the video stream. We're talking 10 or 20 minutes. And even then it may not actually play. Completely unusable. This problem exists for the wireless clients but not so much for the wired clients. But the big TV is connected over the wireless.
Frustrated with this performance, I took another look at XBMC. The first good news is that fedora now has xbmc packaged so installation is a breeze. Getting movies to play requires adding a source, which happens to be the NFS exports from the MythTV backend's video directories. I mount these all under /movies (one external usb drive per directory under /movies). XBMC automatically scans these directories to create its own database of movies. The next good news is that it does this scan quite well. It even creates a variety of ways to browse the videos, such as by genre, director, and year. All automatically. It made only a few minor mistakes in the scan and these are very easy to fix by right clicking the title and doing a refresh, which will bring up a list of possible matches. Picking the right one just requires a little knowledge about when the movie came out.
More importantly, the videos start right up with no delay. They play without skips or pauses over the wireless. As an added bonus, its very easy to add additional sources for Internet based video (such as pbs) using readily available plugins. Finally, the UI is very easy to use and has a lot of style. Videos can play in the background while the weather forecast is brought up in the foreground. Very slick. And the UI scales – I can make change the window size on the fly. MythTV can do this with live tv but not with videos. And it requires setting a configuration option to switch to opengl rendering. XBMC defaults to OpenGL and so this feature is ready without additional configuration
Which leads me to the biggest bonus: the wife likes it. And that means XBMC is now the primary front end for playing stored videos for all my media clients. But it still doesn't replace Hulu Desktop, which we've started using more than the browser because it seems to play video without pauses better. Probably a function of the edge servers in use that serve up content.