Here you go Praks.
Movie Playback
I tried playing the normal 700mb rips, x264 720p and 1080p rips, the less bitrate x264 rips(those 300-400mb movies). All play without any issues. There is some discussion of a particular mkv header giving some problems. I have quite a lot of mkv content from various groups and all worked fine. Haven't tried rmvb and flv as i do not have any. Audio and video is perfect. Not a audiophile. I have connected my headphone to my TV using a 3.5mm extension cable. So no clue about Dolby, spdif etc, etc. Try and figure it out from somewhere else. Subtitles also works good. Has a menu to choose language, color and position of subtitle.
Controls while playing movies
Fast forward works in 2x-32x or you can configure to skip some minutes by pressing forward. Sometimes rewind gets stuck and takes little more time to go back. Doesn't happen always. Not sure what the problem is. Remote is quite crap. It doesn't respond very well. Sometimes you have to press more than once to play/pause and few times it registers as 2 clicks. Menu for browsing your external drive content is ok. Again the media player gets unresponsive sometimes when you press up/down on remote.
Firmware
Did not spend much time on the default firmware. Updated to moServices firmware. You would have done some research on what services it has. Tried youtube and transmission. Youtube works ok. Didnt find any option to switch to HD. There are some other services which i did not try. Upgrading firmware and enabling the services are super easy.
Transmission
First problem is that there is no wireless. You have to get it near your router and connect it with lan cable which in my case is near my PC. I had to switch the display from PC to the media player to set up everything. But i guess you will require to do this only once. Setting up was easy. Was able to access the Media player and the Ext HDD from Win 7.
Transmission client is like Utorrent but with less features. Tried 3 torrents. 11gb, 4gb, and 80mb torrents. Couldnt find any option on max torrents allowed. Not sure how many u can download simultaneously. Initially it worked fine but after some time the client lost the connection. The download continued on the media player but the connection b/w my PC and media player was lost. GUI doesn't show anything. Had to restart the media player to connect again. And the 4gb torrent stopped for some reason. Could not start it again. Had to restart it from beginning. Connection to seeds/peers and speeds are good, just like what i get in utorrent.
My primary requirement was for it to play all formats, which it does flawlessly. I never intended to use it for 24/7 torrent downloads and i just spent 30 mins trying to download torrents. Maybe there are some fixes and other settings available in moServices forum to make BT downloading better. But from what i tested, considering that BT is one of your main requirement i wouldn't really recommend this player to you.
Pros:
Movie playback is great.
Reasonably priced.(Got mine for 5k shipped from ebay)
Media player is pretty compact and looks sleek
Doesn't get heated up and is very quiet.
e-sata
Active support on moServices forum
Cons:
BT downloading is not stable (from my limited testing)
Remote is ugly, and is unresponsive
No HDMI, Lan cable in package
Only 1 USB port
No wifi
From your list of features
Here are few of the requirements.
MUST Support BT Downloads with GOOD client - Inbuilt/mod (Already using Download master of Asus on Router & Fed up of it) - Sort of
External DVD Drive Support - Has a usb. So should support it. Not sure about blue ray disc playback
Optical Out - Yes - if it is spdif you are referring to
HDMI Out - Yes
Normal TV Out (To connect to 29 inch CRT) - Yes
NOT Necessary Features
Internal HDD Support - No
NAS etc. - Yes. But not tested
WiFi - No
Let me know if there is anything you want to know.
Its not like you are marrying your media player. Make up your mind and get one soon
. If you ask me a PC is best for 24/7 torrent downloading.