Viper Lair takes a look at a MPEG4 capable hard drive enclosure/portable multimedia player without the need for a PC for playback. A quote from the article:

While HTPC is the rage, those of us with space limitations, as well as budget ones find several shortcomings to that particular solution. Then we have the Media Center solutions brought to us by the likes of D-Link and Netgear, where they use your OS and storage and their bandwidth to display multimedia on your TV, these have been hit or miss on several things, bandwidth and source system performance being dominant. Now comes GalaXy with an embedded Linux solution that could just fill that void.

GalaXy TVistoU2F Multimedia HDD Enclosure Review