Hehe - that's why I originally bought a flat screen TV! I still had an old fashioned one two years ago but did not want to watch all those nice John Barrowman TV shows on the laptop.

But sadly, not all TVs play all kind of files, so still this is not ideal. I bought an external harddrive now, which has an inbuild mediaplayer, and this is connected to the TV, has a cute little remote and I can watch everything from there. It's awesome. It also plays the subtitle files the TV doesn't play. Plus it serves as a back-up in case my laptop dies. The best 119 Euro I ever spent. It has 1 TB space.

Ha, shortly after you posted this comment, I got to see for myself that it doesn't play all files. Hmph, why can't it just tell me what codec it needs? Although then the question would be how to get that codec onto the TV.

Ah, connecting things to the TV is glorious. I have a Blu-ray drive in my computer and if I could find a cable that's long enough, I could connect my computer to the TV and watch my BDs on the latter.

It's not a question of the codec. You can't fix it. You only can, when buying the TV, having a look at the little plate, as each tells which one they play and which one they don't. Some TV play this, others play that. None play ALL. Except Samsung. Samsung is the only one that indeed plays all files. My parents have a Samsung, that's how I know.

So, do yourself a favour, and buy such a external harddrive like I have. Mine is from WD. Well, technically it does not play everything also, it refuses to play FLV and WMV, and is also iffy with some MPGs (while it does play other MPGs, not sure about the difference here), but I just convert them to AVI with anyvideoconverter and then I am fine.

Argh, WD. I have a perfectly fine external hard drive from WD, but I can't use it because they used a low-quality adapter that's broken now and I can't it replaced, because they're not being produced anymore.

But the files my TV wouldn't play were avi too. Well, it's a container format, so I shouldn't be surprised that my TV plays some avis, but others not.

My WD has its own media player. It come with a little remote as well. I store all the stuff on there and connect it to the TV via HDMI. To put new files on it, I connect it to my laptop via USB.

So you don't need to buy just an external harddrive, of which there are plenty, but one that has an inbuilt media player. It says so on the package. They are a little more pricey for that though.