I have a 2 Tb external hard drive that I link to my laptop and then to the tv to watch movies and stuff.  My "hit the room like a hurricane" 2 year old boy bumped the laptop off of the floating shelf under the tv.  I was thinking of using something else to prevent this from happening again and had a look at multi media players and the Raspberry Pi.

What will be the best Pi to use as I see there is a Pi2, Pi3, A+, B+ model etc and do I need to load anything like KODI onto it to be able to watch movies?

Thanks

I use OpenElec on a both a Pi2 and Pi3b. Kodi also worked on both but I like OpenElec more.

Drive in my case is a QNAP where the entertainment is stored on. It uses less power than a Laptop.

I've been using a MEDE8ER MED500X since 2010 - ripped all the kid's DVDs onto the internal HDD and also use it for movies and series. It is still used daily by the kids - they have a choice of more than 300 of their DVDs and when they go to bed we usually watch an episode or two of one of our favorite series.  I actually bought a newer model (MED800X3D) last year on special, copied everything from the MED500X's HDD to the MED800X3D's HDD, but never started to use the new M8R - the old one just keeps on working...