Will something like this run OpenELEC? There is a Raspberry Pi build for ARM, but the download page [1] says it's specific to the RP. I saw things like the Xtreamer Ultra but it's way out of my budget. Up to a couple hundred dollars is acceptable, but I don't need a full mini-PC. Low power and quiet is far more important to me than say a core i5 CPU.
They run something like openelec (IE XBMC based).
Geexbox is usually what supports these things.
I use a mini-pc (a little asus eeepc box with a "who cares" intel cpu in it and a nvidia gt620m running openelec). The reason is actually simple:
A lot of the embedded processors are much more finicky in terms of hardware decode.
I used to run geexbox on a TI OMAP4460, and it worked wonderfully, right until you hit a track with DTS or DTS-MA audio, and then because it was not hardware supported, it fell right down and couldn't even play at 3fps. Maybe with XBMC now having a new audio engine (This was in the XBMC 11 days) the world is different.
The hardware decoders were also not quite as resilient to restart and had occasionally random failures compared to the nvidia chipset , which were very annoying when watching movies. I have never had this happen on anything in the nvidia/amd/intel world, and anything that can't be hardware decoded, the intel can absolutely handle.
Given the very low idle state of the newer haswell chips, unless you had a strong desire to not be intel based, i'd see if i could find a mobile motherboard and run openelec on a 15w TDP mobile haswell (or at worst, an itx motherboard and core i3 haswell).
Basically, these boxes are fun if you want to futz, but just aren't really "living room ready" unless you have a very fixed set of source video/audio.
I've gone with the WDTV series for my media needs - the earlier gens were very hackable but they've turned on codesigning in the latest WDTV Live Media hub range. They're not bad and play everything I throw at them (Sigmatek decoders, afaicr)
I'm using an older WDTV LIVE and indeed, I never had issues with decoding stuff. The downside is that it's somewhat limited, e.g. I cannot adjust audio sync which sometimes gets quite annoying. Being able to jump 30s (and such) back and forth instead of "analog" rewinding and fast-forwarding would be nice as well.
I'm still waiting for a device that handles XBMC well, is responsive, has an optical audio output and offers DTS pass-through -- apparently there's no such thing. Lack of support for DTS/DD 5.1 pass-through is the main problem; last time I checked Minix seemed to be close, but not there yet.
My current media player is a 3 or 4 year old ACRyan PlayOn Mini, which works wonderfully and has played everything I've ever tried on it. The only downside is that there are some video files which once you start fast-forwarding you can't stop. I _think_ this is due to mkv header compression which my version of the firmware doesn't support.
Since any new media player will be the replacement for my primary TV, it has to pass the wife and daughter test. :)
[1] http://www.openelec.tv/index.php/get-openelec/download