Hi, I'm a user of both and develop a channels.com plugin for both of them.

You're right to be confused. They're very similar at this point. Boxee and Plex are both based on the XBMC codebase (the XBox media center, made originally for hacked XBoxes but cross-platform). Boxee is cross-platform, while Plex is Mac-only.

Boxee has a social networking aspect to it and Plex does not, so if you want to be able to see what your friends are watching, etc, Boxee would be what you and your friends would want to use.

Boxee also looks a bit more polished at the moment. However Plex forked the original XBMC sources and they are now doing their own thing (mostly adding more intimate integration with the Mac), so eventually these will be further and further apart, and there will undoubtedly be things that you can do in Plex that would only be possible on a Mac. Plex is moving very fast with their development, which would be annoying except that Plex update mechanism feels smoother than Boxee's as of right now.

On the more technical side, original xbmc plugins (written in python) will work on both with slight modifications, which makes them the easiest way to code for something that's on top of your television. But they both have released plugin APIs that, while still in python, are incompatible with each other.

If you're commited to Mac forever, you probably want to use Plex. If you find yourself moving between OSs or have many different computers you use regularly, you may want Boxee instead. Eventually there will be more differentiators.
Source(s):
http://wiki.plexapp.com/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.plexapp.com/
http://www.channels.com/
http://wiki.plexapp.com/index.php/Channels.com


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