Media Player that can stream:

Will very soon publish my LAN Streaming bible.

 

As promised, I've published two full(!!!!) treatments, starting with the two most important protocols: SMB and UPnP.

As a summary:

- as you plan to play MKV's AND you want / need to use SMB, look for, say, GoodPlayer but if and only if your MKV's aren't 1080p. (GoodPlayer can't reliably play back 1080p using SW decoding). If they're 1080p, you MUST remux them to iOS-native MP4 (m4v / mov) files.

- UPnP-wise, if you do jailbreak, both XBMC and RushPlayer+ offers accelerated(!!!!) MKV playback over UPnP. Without jailbreaking AND with 1080p files, your only choice is, again, remuxing into iOS-native MP4 (m4v / mov) files.

More info on these protocols and all iOS players supporting them:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=16446566
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=16446551

 

I'm in the process of setting up a media streaming network at home. After trying FileBrowser(doesn't play MKV files) and Buzz Player (very stuttery video playback of MKV) I settled on Goodplayer which seems to do the trick.

It looks like it sees any media server on your local network so I'd say that it should work in your case - I have aWD MyBook Live connected to a Belkin router rather than an EBS but I can't see any reason why the EBS should behave any differently.

I had issues with the original media server (Twonky) on the WD-MBL as WD ship a version that won't work with Samsung TVs Once I'd paid (£14 /$20) for an upgrade and installed it then all worked fine.

The Samsung TV won't play MP4 containers so I have to encode as MKV. I'm using Handbrake to do the ripping which uses AAC for audio encoding by default so I didn't fall foul of the Dolby AC-3 licensing issues that have cropped up recently.

DLNA is at the stage that home networking was ten years ago.