You can use the Mede8er as a NAS so the PC can see it while conencted to the player, or move it from PC to player as required.
If using the drive on the player over the network then the way the drive gets formatted does not matter, chances are the player will format the drive as Ext2 or Ext3 which are Unix formats and a Windows PC will not natively recognise. So if you want the PC to be able to connected to it directly then it will need to be NTFS and this can be done on the PC or Mede8er.
Mark.