Hard drive connection to my HDTV?

Western Digital has a line of http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=30 which would seem to be right up your alley. WD TV Live is $120 on Amazon and offers 1080p output and supports just about every format you'll encounter. In my living room, I have a first-gen PlayStation 3 with approx. 2 terabytes of external USB storage which is all kinds of greatness, but that comes with a steeper price tag and it doesn't support Matroska (.mkv) files, the "scene" standard for HD content. However, transcoding to h.264 is a breeze.

my idea is to either use the external hard drive I have now (about 300 gig capacity), and unplug the thing, walk it over to the TV and connect it. The WDTV linked above is great for this, and works exactly that way. I bought one for a family member in the same situation, downloading things on the PC and occasionally wanting to watch them on the TV, and it worked perfectly. Having the "playing" solution decoupled from the "storage" part is also nice because if you run out of room, just add more. In addition to accepting USB hard disks, a USB thumb drive also works a quick solution for just watching a couple of movies at a time. Copy, watch, delete.

Hard drives just store files. They don't do any kind of reading or output of files. There are devices which contain hard drives, i.e., Apple TV and XBoxes, and additional computing hardware which reads the files and turns them into video output. There are also some DVD players with the ability to read files from USB-connected hard drives. What kind of video files will you want to watch? How do you want to be able to browse and control the content? Do you want to do it from a remote, or would it be OK to have a keyboard and mouse interface?

odinsdream--preferably, any and all kinds of files. And I want to use a remote if possible, but like I said, my computer will be in another room.

I got one of the ASUS O!Play boxes for my kitchen. Browses the local network fine, ethernet and power in, HMDI Out. Couldn't be simpler. Cost about 100USD.

Some TVs do natively understand audio and video codecs and will play them sans external players. I just returned from my parents house and their new Samsung TV happily excepted a flash drive that I plugged in. It was able to do photo slideshows, play music and show videos and it was all controlled via the remote that came with the television. Granted it didn't understand every video file I had on the flash drive but I was impressed nonetheless.

If you would utilize any of the additional functionality it would provide, I would suggest an Xbox 360 for this. It's painless to play media from a connected hard drive or thumbdrive, and with the right http://cynicalpeak.com/rivet/, you could stream your videos, music and photos right from your iMac. In addition to this, you can view Netflix streaming (if you don't mind paying extra for an Xbox Live Gold account), plus games. It's also pretty easy to train a universal remote (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000CCXCYC/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/, etc.) to work with it if you feel so inclined. I use this setup with my HDTV and I'm very happy with it.

The Samsung I just bought not only will play video off a USB drive, but also has the ability to be put on the network as a renderer (or maybe player can't remember) for DLNA. You can even buy a USB wireless adapter like you can with the Xbox360. it supports WMV, DivX, Xvid, H.264, MPEG 1,2, and 4 in a variety of containers. Unlike http://ask.metafilter.com/139282/Hard-drive-connection-to-my-HDTV#1991293, I have had lots of issues using my Xbox360 for this kind of thing; being Microsoft they make it a point to only support their own formats. If you have stuff in other formats you have to transcode or repackag, even if you have Windows Media Center.

The best match for you, if you don't mind spending the cash, is a mac mini. It will read all the files your imac can, and you can use http://www.plexapp.com/ (based on xmbc) as a frontend, and an apple remote for a seamless experience. Add in the fact that you have a machine that can be used fulltime for torernting / newzgroups, and you can have a hefty media setup if your conscience allows.