LaCie's been flaunting the appealing monolithic cubism of its hard drives lately, courtesy of chic designer Neil Poulton, and taking that a step further is Black Max, a home theater video streaming player and recorder with some teeth in it. Plug this ominous underlit do-everything box into your home network, and like a good little server, it finds all the video, audio and pics on your network and offers them up for your perusal, right there on your HDTV.

The best news is the Black Max's versatility, with the power to play back 1080p files, the smarts to record your favorite video like a TiVo does, and the shrewd ability to decipher even the pirate-friendly Matroska (mkv) video format in all its 1080p glory. Its file compatibility list reads like a Manhattan phone book, it's so large (see it after the jump). Available with 500GB or 1TB of storage inside at an undisclosed price, too bad this bad boy will only be available in Europe. At first.

Look at this laundry list of file formats the Black Max can handle. Whoa!

Video
AVI, DivX, MPG, MP4, MKV, WMV, MOV, ISO, VOB, IFO, ASF, TS, TP, TRP, M2TS

Audio
MP3, WMA, AAC, OGG, AC3, MP4, WAV/LPCM

Images
JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIF