Options for Media Center

[ajcdotme]

Greetings,

I'm in the process of rebuilding our media playback network in the house to support our different rooms and requirements including our tablets, etc, and I find myself at pause with regard to a choice for the actual media center devices. I want these to be consistent throughout the house for ease of use (my kids are younger, I'd like to only have to show them one system).

We don't actually subscribe to cable or satellite, instead our content is archived dvds/blurays and streaming media services. In particular, we use netflix streaming. Which is, I guess, where my issue is.

We've used an xbox 360 as the media center in our family room for quite some time. Unfortunately, I'm not very happy with its support for smaller media formats, although netflix on the xbox is a dream.

I've used Windows MCE since it first came out and I'm disappointed at the lack of "growth" i've seen on that front. However, with netflix requiring silverlight, how many other native options are out there?

A little more about the setup:

Content is stored and controlled on a central server running Ubuntu. This is a non-negotiable as my dev boxes for work run on kvm on this box as well.

We have a pair of ipads and an android tablet, all of which are used to watch content (mostly by the kids).

There's a pc with a touchscreen in the kitchen for recipes and such in the kitchen... it's wireless and is used at times to watch tv on as well.

The family room and the kids bedrooms have small pc's in them connected to the tvs for content playback.

I'm fine with a technical solution... it doesn't really have to be "easy" to deploy... but it DOES have to be easy to use once deployed and MUST support playback of content over the network AND netflix.

I've already looked over xbmc and it does not appear to support netflix. Plex doesn't look promising either.

Any help/suggestions would be much appreciated.