[Scott R]

If it is to be believed, there's been a grand total of 7 VC1 releases the last 2 years, last in october 2013

FWIW, I've been doing some more testing. XBMC Gotham nightly build (4/18, I believe). I also installed PleXBMC because I use Plex Media Server and am a fan of that. First, a big caveat: I haven't actually watched any movies from beginning to end, so I can't say that there aren't any issues like pauses/stutters that occur deep into playing a movie, or crashes, or whatever. My testing so far is just firing up a movie and watching a minute or two of it to see how smooth it appears to play.

Another note: I do not rip HD audio tracks. Just the core 5.1 Dolby Digital or DTS track.

So, as I said before, h264 (MPEG-4) full-bitrate Blu-ray rips seem to play well. And I confirmed last night that Dolby Digital and DTS pass-thru works well. Actually, I just remembered a minor issue: One of the test videos I tried was Ratatouille. During the opening Pixar logo sequence (where the lamp jumps on the Pixar logo) I saw a brief flash of green (or was it purple?) in the white background. It was brief and I didn't notice anything weird like that when watching segments of the actual movie.

I've also played some MPEG-2 HDTV video (Windows Media Center .WTV files) and those played well also. Something about the video looked less than perfect/smooth. But I'm not sure if it was dropping frames or if it was due to deinterlacing of the 1080i video. Overall, though, I'd consider it to be completely watchable, and I'm pretty particular about those things. YMMV.

VC-1 Blu-ray rips did not play well. Very choppy and unwatchable. Now, here's where I might have some good news for some of you. If you're willing to run Plex, I was able able to jump into the Plex settings (via the Plex-friendly Amber skin in XBMC) and turn on "Force Transcoding" and then play the VC-1 videos well. Of course, behind the scenes, that's causing your Plex Media Server to crank through some CPU usage to do on the-fly-transcoding. This workaround is also a bit cumbersome, because you'll want to remember to turn off "Force Transcoding" afterwards, so that the rest of the time the videos just get sent as-is to XBMC on the Fire TV. Presumably, once the Plex devs work through their bugs, this behavior would be automatic when running through the Plex client.

Due to the smaller number of VC-1 titles out there, I think I could possibly live without native VC-1 hardware decoding. For me, the feature that it lacks that bugs me the most is 24Hz/fps support. But I could probably learn to live without that, too.

Overall, as things stand, I'm now leaning towards keeping this thing. I went into it thinking I'd be disappointed overall, and it's starting to win me over. The other challenge for me is that my Apple TV (3rd gen) also works well as a $100 streamer. While there's no way to get XBMC or Plex installed on it, I can use the Plex app on my iPhone and send content to the ATV3 via AirPlay which actually works more like a ChromeCast when doing so (i.e., the iPhone works as a remote and no actual video content is streaming through the iPhone - the content goes directly from Plex Media Server to the ATV3). In any case, for $100, I'm thinking I'll keep the Fire TV and see what Amazon, the Plex devs, and the XBMC devs do to improve it further.