Player that will play DVD & BR-DVD from hard drive?

[smetaxas]

Is there a BR-DVD player or some type of simple device that will display & play the movies straight from a large hard drive (2-4 TB) without streaming? Just plug in the hard drive via USB or E-SATA & have them show up on a menu? I know there is software to do this with an Apple-TV but it appears to be limited to 720p. That would work fine for regular DVDs but I would obviously like to have Blu-Ray discs at 1080p.

[MilesAhead]

You can take a look at WD HDTV player for USB drives. I expect with USB 3.0 devices coming out that they will be updated to USB 3.0 soon. I have the first version and it plays .m2ts files and HD avi/divx pretty well. If you have an .mkv file you might consider converting to .m2ts first, esp. if it's over 6 GB. The best feature of this unit is it supports USB 2.0 docking stations. You can use internal Sata drives by just plugging them into the dock. Much nicer than unplugging cables and power cords every time you swap a drive out.

[tony55]

Along with the WD device is the Segate device and a few others as well. I have both the WD and Segate. They are similar in most ways but the Seagate is a bit more sophisticated in its ability to play chapters and menus. They accept Fat32 as well as NTFS so you can have files as large as you want.

My opinion, these media devices are the way to play movies from a hard disk.

Tony