I naively bought a two Memorex MVBD 2510 players last fall - one for my dad and and one for myself. They were good Black Friday deals, so I have no buyer's remorse. I knew they didn't have an ethernet port, but I had no idea what good it might be. I still can only guess what utility I might get from having my player on my home network.
Like most of these players, it has a USB port, so I quickly got into experimentation and found that it would play MP4, AVI, and a mess of other file formats, but not every file format. Around the same time, MKV files started to become prevalent. The Memorex doesn't like MKV's but they play wonderfully from VLC on my computer (which has a 24" HD widescreen). I don't live and breath for this stuff, but I am an enthusiast, so it took me a while to understand why we needed yet another format!
MKV (Matroska) is a container. From what I can tell, it is lossless, and it gets a small amount of compression. They can hold a lot of stuff, but in order to use them with devices that don't support it (and aren't being well supported by the manufacturer), you have to do something with them. I have the answer for that!
You could get a conversion program that knows how to read these files and write them out to another format - like AVI or MP4. That means all your content is going through another rendering and compressing process. Although the results may be acceptable , I know there is no way doing this is going to improve the video or audio. And it takes a long time. We need something better.
The answer is demuxing the file (and maybe doing something cool with the demuxed content). Demuxing the MKV contents to a .ts file will work with the Memorex (and thus I would think many other - better - players). The tool to do this is TXMUXER. Demuxing is as fast as your disk (you will wish you had a fast disk setup) and there is no re-compression.
The only problem is (at least with the Memorex) that .ts files act a lot like AVI's or other files played on the Memorex - rewind, fast forward and other operations don't always work as you would like, but otherwise, it's not a bad arrangement. You get the nice menu from the player and you can select the files nicely (just don't make the name too long - no scrolling on the Memorex).
MKVExtractGUI includes the ability to extract files to a Blu-Ray or AVCHD folder structure that it creates. AVCHD is what you want. Many BD players (Memorex and Playstation 3 included) support AVCHD. It's basically a Blu-Ray file system for DVD 5 (4.7GB DVD recordable discs). I haven't explored all the audio possibilities of this (Blu-Ray includes several outstanding lossless formats). These AVCHD discs have no menu, but you can "join" multiple input files and add chapter stops at whatever point you like (think "episodes"). Just burn the two folders the process creates to a UDF file system on a DVD 5 (I have not yet tried this with a DVD 9, but that is coming).
With a little trial and error, I've come up with a nice way to play and store content.
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