I’ve been watching Jeff MacArthur’s Decabled blog for awhile now – we canceled our cable connection a couple years back and have been subsisting entirely off of media downloaded from the Internet. Of course, getting this media to the television in an attractive, mother-in-law-friendly way has always been a challenge.

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!)