I have been wandering around looking at various forms of technology which offer LAN storage and playback to TV in the one device.

I stumbled on this tool

http://www.sarotech.com/english/support/manager.html

It is a free software package which supposedly auto-converts video into a format compatible with several SIGMA DESIGNS chipsets, commonly used in portable and standalone playback appliances.

Just another way of doing the same thing. The quality of the generated video is not so great.