Both Plex and Boxee are forks of the popular XBMC. While Boxee and XBMC are capable of running on multiple platforms, Plex is designed and built specifically for Apple hardware and OS X features. Each of these will be very similar and have similar features but I have chosen to use Plex due to personal preference and experiences.

Plex will initially blow you away with its beautiful 10-foot user interface that makes it a joy to use from the comfort of your couch. Since I started using Plex I have thrown lots of media formats at it and I have had no problems playing any of them.  In addition to personal content stored on your hard drive, Plex can also stream audio and video from some of the most popular online sources including: Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, Pandora, Fox News, CNN and many others.

The real beauty of Plex, however, comes from its ability to retrieve metadata from Internet sources like IMDB, and TheTVDB and display fan art, posters, plot and episode information for all of your content. And it's all automatic so you have to do very little work but receive an amazing experience.

Plex has excellent support in the form of a great wiki and user forum, all on their site. The few questions I had were SO easy to find on the wiki, it was a breeze setting things up. After spending a little time with it, I was able to easily navigate the settings and configurations. Once you've got Plex downloaded and setup using the Getting Started Guide on their wiki your content should start appearing with poster art, fan art, plot, year, etc. More details on customizing your experience in a future post. 

In addition to Plex, you will need a way to get your content onto your hard drive and into your collection. There are multiple ways of doing this but I have found that by using Mac The Ripper and/or Handbrake I am able to rip most DVDs to a quality of my liking.  I won't be going too much into either of these right now but they are essential. More information to follow in a future post.

In addition to ripping my content, I am also downloading TV episodes using BitTorrent.  If you are not familiar with BitTorrent or would like more information on it you can view this Beginners Guide or find many others online. A few tools I use to do this are Transmission & ShowRSS website to generate RSS feeds of the TV series I follow for easy download.  I will get more into this in a later post.

More information on many of these will be coming later but that should be a good place to start. 

Stay tuned.....