HD Media Player options
 

I just got an HDTV, and I am a big user of XBMC, however with the new
TV the standard def isn't cutting it. I use XBMC to stream divx/xvid
files off my linux server, and I trying to understand what my options
are to have a similar setup that supports HD. There are several
pieces of hardware that seem to do what I want:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...player&x=0&y=0

however, it seems like many of these media players won't just connect to
a samba share, but instead require some special server program running.
I suspect these server programs are going to take a divx file, decode it
and reencode it to another lossy format, thus losing picture quality. Is
that a correct understanding of how these things work? (if so, man that's
sad, why would anyone want that?) Are there any HD media players which will
just read a samba share of divx/xvid files?