My thinking would be the portability factor (I have 2 HD TVs in the house but only one blu-ray player)

I've got one of those DVD players with the USB port that you can play things from a memory stick, BUT once the files are up to and beyond 1gB, that system fails, hence you can't watch HD movies from files with that.

Anyone have one they recommend? I'm looking for something around the $100 mark if they exist.

I'm still not exactly sure what you are looking for. I did some research and purchased a Samsung Blu-Ray player that will play damn near anything from a data disc. I use it to play MP3 discs, look at pictures (without resizing them, yaaay!) on disc and watch movies from files. Depending on the quality you're looking for you can fit between 2 and 7 files on a single-layer DVD. It reads avi, mkv, mpeg and something else that I'm forgetting. It doesn't read mp4 right now, but I think I can do a firmware update to fix that. It also does a fine job with ripped movies (video_ts). I don't have a Blu-Ray burner so I haven't tried that yet.

Apologies if this in no way answers your question.

Cerebus said:

I'm still not exactly sure what you are looking for. I did some research and purchased a Samsung Blu-Ray player that will play damn near anything from a data disc. I use it to play MP3 discs, look at pictures (without resizing them, yaaay!) on disc and watch movies from files. Depending on the quality you're looking for you can fit between 2 and 7 files on a single-layer DVD. It reads avi, mkv, mpeg and something else that I'm forgetting. It doesn't read mp4 right now, but I think I can do a firmware update to fix that. It also does a fine job with ripped movies (video_ts). I don't have a Blu-Ray burner so I haven't tried that yet.

Apologies if this in no way answers your question.

I mean these type things:

I have a file here on my desktop that is closer to 5gB that won't fit on a DVD-R

and I also have ones much bigger (very high res video files of the music videos we make for example) that we can only watch on the computer or laptop hooked up to the TV, but I find the laptop solution fiddly and a pain in ass regarding setting resolution and aspect ratio EVERY TIME I would love a box that you just plug in, hook up your harddrive to, and play.

For some reason, a portable hard drive doesn't work on our crappy Tevion DVD player with USB port. We have tried reformatting it but no luck.

Ah ok. I get it now. None of my external hard drives work with my NOT crappy Blu-Ray player or my NOT crappy HDTV, either. I think you need one of those boxes there to get them to work properly and I have absolutely no knowledge of how they work, or what would constitute a "good one". If there's a way to make the hard drives work without one of those boxes, I haven't figured it out yet. So hopefully somebody with knowledge of such things will jump up in here and explain it.

Cerebus said:

Ah ok. I get it now. None of my external hard drives work with my NOT crappy Blu-Ray player or my NOT crappy HDTV, either. I think you need one of those boxes there to get them to work properly and I have absolutely no knowledge of how they work, or what would constitute a "good one". If there's a way to make the hard drives work without one of those boxes, I haven't figured it out yet. So hopefully somebody with knowledge of such things will jump up in here and explain it.

I'm hoping so!!!