Viewing Movies Stored On USB

kah22

Couldn't find a more appropriate thread so hopefully this is the right place to post.

I’ve just recently bought s Sony kdl 32ex403 hd television and I’m pretty pleased with it, one of my main reasons for buying was that I could get RTE digital up here in the North. The television supports a usb port.

Today my niece gave me a 8GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro usb2.0 Flash Drive and suggested that if I wanted to watch a movie that was stored on my external hard drive rather than having to watch it on my laptop I could save it to the flash drive, plug it into the television and watch it that way.

Of course life is not like that, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this post. I copied two movies and a sample file of a popular television program from my external hard drive onto the flash pen and could quite easily watch them on the laptop. However, when I plugged the flash drive into the television and attempted to access them via the television I got the message ‘There are no items to display.’

The flash drive itself seems to come portioned and takes up two drives: one supports U3 System and the other the flash drive itself. Don’t know why that should be!

My laptop is pretty old and has no hdmi port but I hope to buy a new one come the end of July and hopefully then I’ll be able to hook the telly direct to the television and not have to go do all these work arounds. I'm currently thinking Sony Viao as it should match in with the television and maybe talk more easily to it.

I thought it would be even simpler to watch the movies via my DVD Players flash drive but it won’t get passed the ‘loading’ stage.

I've tried Googling the above but a lot of the Q/A date back a few years and television technology has moved on quite a bit so I didn't really find anything useful.

Any suggestions?

knx

What format are you using.


"Can now playback DivX/ XviD/ AVI/ AVC video files over DLNA and USB (previously only limited to MPEG1)." - Taken from hdtvtest.co.uk..

andy1249

However, when I plugged the flash drive into the television and attempted to access them via the television I got the message ‘There are no items to display.’

The flash drive itself seems to come portioned and takes up two drives: one supports U3 System and the other the flash drive itself. Don’t know why that should be!

Theres a few things that might be going on here.

First off , USB ports on non computing devices must have some firmware/software installed that plays back the media files it says it supports.

It this case it looks like " DivX/ XviD/ AVI/ AVC video files " , and probably some audio files as well.

However it also needs to support a file system , and with most devices this is usually FAT32 , thats the most common. So the stick would need to be formatted to FAT32 for it to work.

Some devices , LG for example , can do NTFS as well , but this is not nearly as common as FAT32 , so check if the drive is FAT32 or NTFS.

Second , and this is my favourite for the cause of your problem ...

Most devices that can play media files from a USB stick will only recognise the first logical partition.
I know this is the case with the PS3 , WDTV , Oppo BD83 , and so on , so if you have an external storage device with more than one partition , you will only see the first one.

And this brings us to U3 .... U3 is a very handy little feature to have with a USB stick , but only if your using the drive exclusively with computers , you can read about U3 here ,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U3

Some host systems – such as photo kiosks, consumer electronics, and other embedded computing devices – cannot correctly mount U3 "smart drives." The problem may arise because the emulated CD-ROM is the first drive presented to the host system. As such, the device is detected as a CD-ROM drive or not at all. Although some newer photo kiosks are U3 aware[9] and can overcome this limitation, it still exists on many platforms. In embedded systems, where program memory is limited, it may be very costly in terms of system resources to make a device U3 aware. In such cases it is far more logical to leave this functionality out.

The problem is that U3 will try to fire up its launch program on connection , as a consumer electronics device has no computer like OS this will fail , and as most can only see one partition, its likely that the partition that contains the media files cannot be seen.

So in order to play your files on the device in question , you need a plain vanilla unpartitioned USB stick with no extra features like U3 , and it needs to be formatted to the file system that the device uses.

superleedsdub

Hi Kah22,

IMO I think you should buy a media player with an external or internal harddrive. You would then just copy the files onto the harddrive and connect the media directly to your TV. This is much better option than connecting a laptop to the TV IMO (e.g. no need to change resolution settings etc on the laptop each time)

I personally use the WDTV live (was previously using my PS3) but there are plenty of great media players out there. The WDTV is connected directly to the tv by HDMI and I have an external hard drive connected bu USB to the WDTV. You can also connect your USB flash drive.

Most TV`s don`t support .mkv files etc through USB drives connected directly to the TV. One of the advantages of a media player is that they support most file codecs and are upgradable through firmware updates etc....

kah22

A media player might be the way to go - but not just at the moment I have other commitments

studdlymurphy

It may not support the size of the USB stick. Some dont support over 2GB and yours in 8GB. Why not try a stick smaller than 2GB to rule this out.

ricman

get a cheap 2,4 gig key,make sure it doesnt have u3 software ,have a look on the drive box ,before you buy does it mention smart u3 .U3 is a total waste of space ,you have to click it to acess the data,it looks like 2 drives ,eg e, f drive.TVS have no way to activate it.