RPi as NAS for HD media

[Gelgamek]

Apologies for yet another NAS post, but despite numerous forum and Google searches I still haven't found any definitive answers.

I'm looking to set up one of my Pis as a NAS to stream movies (many of which are 1080p) and music to a WD-TV box. Ideally the drive would also be accessible using Windows.

I've found quite a few tutorials, with this one cropping up most often. Unfortunately it states right at the start that it isn't suitable for streaming HD video; this seems to be the case for most I've found.

From poking around the forum it appears that it is actually possible for the Pi to stream HD video, but I'm not sure if this would mean avoiding Samba and using en ext3/ext4 file system. I'm thinking Arch Linux is the way to go as far as the OS is concerned, but other than that I'm drawing a blank.

If anyone's managed to set their Pi up so it can stream HD from an NTFS drive, any advice they can give would be much appreciated.

[Gelgamek]

In case this might be helpful to anyone else:

I've had absolutely no problem streaming 1080p DTS Audio .mkv files of around 10GB with the Pi running both Samba and MiniDLNA; works just fine whether streaming from the DLNA server or from Samba as a Windows share folder. No idea how much luck people wanting to stream full-fat, uncompressed BD rips will have, but that's surplus to my requirements.

CPU is OC'd to 900MHz with no overvoltage, only 48MB of memory is reserved for the GPU (couldn't set it as low as 16MB, the Pi wouldn't boot. I've got the 512MB model), files are streamed from a connected 2TB USB HDD.

[Cloudcentric]

What Linux Distribution did you use ?

[Gelgamek]

Sorry, should have mentioned; I'm using Arch Linux.