Sticking it to the man (aka cable company)

With Time Warner prices steadily rising, the powers that be in my house (my wife) decided that it was time to seriously consider ditching cable. I've dabbled in the media streamer market for a couple years now and I currently own a Popbox 3D and Logitech Revue. Here are my thoughts on each of these;

Popbox 3D - This is currently my main living room box. The built-in software is complete junk. The box pretty much requires YAMJ to run properly, and for those of you who know YAMJ you know it's not the most user-friendly experience. I'm at the point now where I have everything set up properly, scrapping, artwork, etc. and it works fairly well. The only things missing are resume functionality, and proper ISO support

Logitech Revue - Once again, the built-in software player is junk. And no DTS support. I'm currently running the Plex app with associated Plex Media Server on my PC and it works very well. It transcodes DTS audio on the fly and serves me well as a secondary box for the bedroom. Most of the available apps are useless, except Chrome, which is a novelty at best.

If we're ditching cable, I think we need to get Hulu Plus for streaming. I don't use Hulu now (although it is available through the Plex app on the Revue) but a lot of the shows we watch are available so it's probably worth the 8 bucks per month.

In short, I'm looking for some advice on a great living room player with the following must-haves;

• 1080p and 3D functionality
• Hulu Plus support
• Dolby and DTS audio support
• Resume functionality
• ISO support for DVDs and Blu-Rays

And hopefully some or all of these nice-to-haves;

• Gigabit LAN
• Plex support

Boxes I've looked at so far;

PCH A400 - not a huge Syabas fan after my Popbox experiences
Dune - don't know much about these players, but I hear they are the bees knees
Roku 2 XS - good basic player with a lot of features, including Hulu and Plex
HTPC (Asus Revo) - can be built to suit my needs, using XBMC. Wonky Hulu support?
Pivos AIOS or XIOS - lack of Hulu?
Micca EP600 - lack of Hulu?

The one caveat in this whole ordeal is the loss of ESPN. I don't watch a ton of sports, but I do watch Monday night football on ESPN and local college sports (Syracuse) which are usually broadcast on either ESPN or one of the Time Warner sports channels.

I hadn't thought about having 2 boxes, although I wouldn't mind having 2 (1 would essentially replace the cable box that I have now). However, the Mede8er doesn't have YAMJ or Plex support so if I went that route I'd have to deal with a 3rd media manager which doesn't sound very appealing to me.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that require an active cable or satellite subscription?

I've kind of been leaning toward a proper HTPC with XBMC anyway because it seems like the most stable option and would give me the flexibility to upgrade, etc. Many of these other boxes have bugs/issues even months after release. That's not to say XBMC doesn't have it's issues, I just think it's the most popular option with the most support right now. Although that won't give me Hulu without some tinkering, just based on my quick reading.

Still open to other ideas/options.