I'm looking for a blu-ray player with these specific features.

[DeeBye]

Something to possibly consider is that you can set some media sharing on a windows 7 comp.

I really just want a single unit to play all the media on my TV. I know I can do it all with my computer connected to the TV, but I want to keep it as simple as possible so my son and wife can play whatever they want without having to use my computer to do it. This blu-ray player will be replacing a Philips divx DVD player that they used to use to play divx media from a flash drive and regular DVDs, so it will be exactly the same for them but can also handle high-def stuff I have on an external HDD.

Not really. MKV is a container file format (similar to AVI, but with more advanced features), and does not actually have anything to do with the quality or size of the video. That is determined by the codec (such as divx, xvid, H.264, etc) used to encode the video component contained within the MKV file.

Before you buy the Blu-Ray player, check which video (and to a lesser extent audio) codecs it supports. High quality rips will nearly always be in H.264 format, but lower quality ones are usually divx, xvid or mp4 format. Not all players will decode all of the formats.

Yeah, I know that was not exactly correct, but it was more of an analogy.

From what I heard, LG support of various MKV stuff is pretty good.