[kye]

thinking of ordering this from US amazon site. how does xbmc compare with other devices on the market.
Has anyone ordered this from the US?

I picked up my FireTV from BestBuy as it is $99 no matter where you buy it from and I did not want to wait for shipping.

I have been running XBMC since the early days and have ran it on various hardware such as Xbox's, PC's, Mac's and AppleTV's. The FireTV is hands down the best XBMC hardware for a reasonable price. I have only recently gotten my FireTV, about a week ago, but have made some major strides with it. This is my first Android device so I did not have any familiarity and am learning it all for the first time. I have been able to replace the FireTV startup with XBMC as many people have been discussing. More importantly I was able to directly connect a USB HD and load files off that, something the AppleTV is unable to do. I just started working on having the FireTV run it's own MySQL server for a centralized XBMC database.

My dream setup with the FireTV should be possible and will look something like this. One main FireTV on the living room TV which acts as the MySQL server and SMB server to share all the data stored on a USB HD (I do have a NAS but want to see what is possible without it). Then other FireTVs in the house will be connected to any other TVs and they will play the videos and access the MySQL database from the living room FireTV.

Being able to create a whole house XBMC network for a few hundred is very attractive and I do not think any other devices come close to the quality and power of the FireTV as it stands.