I would like to agree that Plex is much more than just a media center. For people, who like to stream their media to several computers or devices, the two parts (media center and media server) might be a good solution. But for people, who just uses the media center on one computer, this solution is too heavy. The Plex server is running all the time in the background and eats processor time.

All 3 solutions have a nice interface, but in my opinion this has a drawback: the titles and description are very small – 1/3 of the screen is used for “coolness”. And the contrast is too low.

Another drawback is the renaming of movies if the metadata is wrong. And the newest version of Plex just says “can not play ISO files” if I try to watch a DVD.

Last but not least you forgot to mention nessMediaCenter, a solution which is suitable replacement for Front Row: easy to use with a clean look and feel and direct access to movie / picture folder and volumes.

I can’t believe you didn’t think better about posting your “review” of Plex. A competent reviewer would have at least got it working properly before giving it a review. Admitting you couldn’t get it working is hardly justification of a bad review in my opinion.

I have used Boxee for many months before giving up on it, moving to XBMC for a while and eventually settling on Plex. Boxee has some pretty annoying bugs that are never getting fixed because the developers have abandoned it.

Plex isn’t perfect but it’s extremely well featured as the commenter above has mentioned but with all the features comes complexity (and the occasional bug). I occasionally myself forced to use VLC to the web to watch media that Plex can’t playback for what ever reason.

Which is what has lead me here. I have just embarked on another search for a media centre app for my Mac Mini in case some talented an enterprising developers have recently released something more simple and reliable that the current offerings. Unfortunately I am yet to find anything new and worthy of further investigation.

Squire from Sylion was one such app that was in alpha when I was looking at a while ago but it appears that development for the desktop has ceased and has morphed into an iPad app instead. Which is a shame. It showed a lot of promise.

The reason for the server-part is that one can actually share his/her library with other plex users.
When you start plex, you can see the library of someone else as well – anywhere on this planet. And it streams to whatever device from that other user. The server is needed to realtime transcode the movie in a certain bitrate (which can be set). Thus, the server can run on a separate (dedicated) machine.
There is no use in streaming a 1080p to an iphone, so the server takes care of the resolution and bitrates.

No mediacenter exists that provides this kind of capability and there is way more to it. Plex is an very advanced version of XBMC.

I think your remark of “youtube mediaplayer” actually belongs to xbmc instead.