Advice please- O/S and application best suited to 1080p play of movie files

[mikezoe]

I have trawled through the forum but have not found any discussion about how best to use the RPi to play HD movie files through a HDTV. Which O/S is best suited maybe because there is a playback app (hopefully free or low priced) already available. Would it be feasible to play these files from a USB 2 hard drive or would it be better to use an extended partition of the SD card which contains the O/S?

[chickey]

If your search for xbmc or openelec you"ll find lots of threads discussing this and some great ideas.

Col