You could look into getting a nettop. They are pretty popular alternatives to custom built HTPCs and are inexpensive. I bought one for my family a few years ago and it uses XBMC. It's pretty awesome. But they will be a little more expensive than $100. I'd expect to pay about $150-300 for one.
If you just want to save some money though I would get an AppleTV 2 and put XBMC on it. Pretty sure it will play whatever you want through software decoding and you have a lot of options.
This is the skin I'm currently using with my setup.
I've got a few addons, one of which will download all art automatically just by running it. If you have a large library you can also use a program like Ember Media Manager to download everything separately. I use it first because I like to choose which posters to download and then I let XBMC scrape what it wants.
XBMC has a web interface too which allows you to use a computer/mobile phone as a remote. Something satisfying about being able to control playback of all my media from miles away.
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