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been watching this new show, i am kind of behind, on episode 6 now while the broadcast just played 10. that's good, i can watch them all in sequence at 40 min a piece. i got the episodes as mkv files, which are a pain because no device (or very few devices) can play them back.

as a temporary solution i used nicole's lenovo netbook hooked up via the hdmi port to the tv. worked great, the files were 720p and they played fine. longer term, though, i have ordered a WD Live player, it handles all known file formats, has a small footprint, it can be networked, and it's pretty economical. so far i have been using the xbox to play back, which works well, but it does choke on a few formats, like mkv and a few others. you can get around it by changing the container to MP4 (no need to re-compress, as i mentioned in the past), but then you have to downmix the sound to 2 channels because the xbox won't play multi-channel audio inside the MP4 container, bah. in any event, the new solution should do everything i want easily. will hook up into a DVI input on the received, that way it can be output either on the TV or on the projector.