The Escient Powerplay was always very stable for me. I never actually had to reboot the unit due to a crash, although I did have to reboot it in order to correct the slow screen redraw effect from their decision to use Windows 98... I did have a transport go down, but this was most likely an environmental issue. Control was via Crestron. I think it is too expensive for what it does.

I own the Sony DVD changer. It is pretty nice, but definitely has some flaws.
1) The screenshot resolution is really too low to browse your collection visually.
2) The unit's OSD is very slow and makes browsing this way very cumbersome. Knowing your disc title and slot numbers would be really helpfull with this unit.
3) No field search capability.
4) Of the 100 DVD titles that I loaded into it, about 7 came up with the data fields populated automatically. Granted that most of my DVDs are old, it was a pain to enter this data manually.