JohnDuncan:We want a DVD ripped to a VIDEO_TS directory and playing on your telly by the end of the evening an' all (for research purposes only of course)...
I can confirm that this works, well on the basic model that I've used. I threw .avi, divx, mkv and video files (vob, video_ts etc) at it and no problem. They are even supposed to be able to play img files like iso!