Back to Technology: The Networked Media Tank

I've recently lost a little focus, writing about things other than technology. Today, I'd like to go back, namely to a product that is coming out soon, the networked media tank (NMT). This is from a company called Sybas, but they only sell to other distributors right now, like popcornhour. I've been looking at one of these, as it is basically a standalone playback device that can play directly from a hard drive, and can connect to a screen/TV via HDMI, component, etc. Think "stripped down home theater PC" (or "Apple TV without the restrictions of the iTunes/Apple universe").

I've got a lot of media recorded from my DVR and backed up onto external HDD, and as I've said before, it would be great to have a simple solution to play this content back without having ANOTHER huge device in my entertainment center, be it full blown computer or my laptop. I thought the PS3 would do it, but Sony's MPEG playback is still bugging out on files that do fine on a PC...but I digress, I'm tired of that not working. As it is now, I have to set up my laptop whenever I wish to watch this content. I have to:

1. Plug my laptop into the power outlet.
   
2. Plug the external drive into the power outlet.
   
3. Plug USB from the drive to the laptop.
4. Plug the mini-DVI to HDMI cable into my laptop.

Its pretty intense and takes just a couple minutes longer than I want. The NMT might solve my problems now, as it can playback the files off of my drive directly. Of course there is still the dreaded filesystem support question...it looks like the NMT supports the Linux EXT3 filesystem and no others, so this is another issue...sigh.