How can I get continuous playback of video clips?

I have just bought WD TV Live, mainly so that I could play back (in HD) videos recorded on an HD camcorder.

The video files, as saved from my Panasonic camcorder, are in m2ts format, with a separate file per clip.

I have copied these files onto a USB 2.0 external hard drive (Samsung S2), connected directly to the WD TV live.

These files playback correctly, but if I select several files and try to play them, there is a several second delay between each clip, while the next clip is being loaded.  Clearly this doesn’t do much for the viewing pleasure, given that each clip is only a few seconds long anyway.

Can someone tell me whether it should be possible to get these playing back continuously and if so, how?

I know that I could run them through a video editor and create one big file, but that takes a lot of effort and I would rather avoid that initially.

Nope… short of editing them, as you’ve already noted, there’s no way to do that.