its always this price, so not a big deal
only time i have seen this cheaper was on black friday, and even then it wasnt much cheaper

Does anyone know how hard it is to hack one of these? I want one that can play h264.

Do not know about the h264, but I have one from INOI that I got on Ebay for $65 and it plays almost any DivX codec. INOI only has component so 1080p is not supported but the price is a lot less than MediaGate.

Got one of these for $175 last month. So far so good, but haven't really used it fully. Looking for a cheap 250G+ IDE hard drive to stick in it.

Interface is crappy but streaming my mpeg files from my PC is nice. i download the mpegs from my replaytv and send it back through the mediagate.

next thing i need to try is ripping a DVD and playing that through the mediagate...

Has xPCgear gotten any better?

I placed an order with them in August, excited about their "free 2nd day air". a week and a half later, the response to my email was "Sorry, we were too busy to get to your order [for the last week]". Four days later, I got my package, 2 weeks after order date. Anyone recently get better results?

I ordered this from xPCGear about a month ago. It was delivered 3 days after I ordered with the "free 2nd day air". The MediaGate itself plays everything I have thrown at it (DivX, MP4, ISO). I picked up a 500GB drive from xPCGear and have it almost filled already. The external USB port is great too as it sees it as just another drive. I read somewhere that someone has connected 7 USB drive using powered hubs. That allows you to have plenty of space to grow into.

what is the biggest size hard drive you can put in here? Also, does it have to be a SATA HD or something like that.

per their website:
"users can easily install up to 750GB IDE hard drive for storing digital movies "

This thing is at least 2 years old.

I'm waiting for an updated model, hopefully with an improved user-interface.