ok, I was having some problems with plex and after much tweaking I started completely over with my ATV 2 setup. What's funny is that after the first time taking about 4 days (pre Seasonpass and the plex site being down workaround, etc) the 2nd attempt only took a couple hours. So thanks fireCore team for SeasonPass (not without some issues though, took 4 attempts to get past step 5) and for the updates to aTV flash.
fireCore guys - update your blog. Some cool new features in the latest beta and I was suprised to see a Plex and Xbmc plugin install right there in Maintenance - Manage Extras. It only took minute to install both and poof, I had both Plex and Xbmc right there to play with. I think if you guys would communicate your updates more it might build some more excitement (maybe less confusion and b****ing from some people too).
So anyone wondering about Plex and xbmc, there's a lot to like about both but they both have some problems too. Plex has an amazing interface and managing the media from the plex media server on a computer is very intuitive, though performance on the ATV since the latest version is not great. The streaming continues to pause so it's basically not usable and it doesn't play some of my media and I'm not sure why.
I was playing with xbmc last night and it's pretty impressive. It's pretty cool to have a full client running from the ATV and the performance is great. It plays all my media and there isn't any pausing, it just works :) Though the interface is not nearly as intuitive as Plex, there's some bugs in the settings, you have to setup a smb share to see your movies and the media structure sort of sucks (you have to navigate to the media file to play your movie) where plex just recognizes all the media in a share, scans it to get all the organization stuff and presents it nicely in ATV.
So i guess there are advantages to both approaches. I like having a full client on the ATV especially when the performance is that awesome but I think having Plex run from a computer (when the update the performance) is nice too. It's easier to manage the media and you can watch movies from the same PMS on your atv, iPad, laptop. I'm not sure if you can do that with xbmc though.
I think its cool to have both available and see where it goes. Also to have both there in the aTV flash beta is a pretty sweet.
Thanks firecore team. Good stuff.