Help..Television not picking up hard drive

delta1980

Hi girlfriend has a seagate hard drive with movies on it , works fine on pc but when connected to Sony LCD tv can't access them ... Any reason why .. Btw I'm not that technically minded

fionny

What model is the TV? MOST older tv's cannot just play off a drive.

What formats are the movies in, while the tv may people able to play off a hard drive it might not be able to play the files you have saved on it.

kirving

If it is a Sony Smart TV, it will only read certain formats. You'll have to check for youself which formats it supports. I know that it won't read .mkv files.

-( i )- Wicker

Is it finding anything on the drive? Images, music, anything?

yoyo

Hmm starting with the obvious make sure the drive is formatted to FAT32 format, not Ext3, NTFS, HFS etc. To format it you will loose all data on the drive so make sure to back it up on the computer first

Nick

Torqay

Got a Bravia myself and the USB viewer supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 and exFAT file systems.

Hard luck, if the drive is NTFS formatted.

doctorg

Torqay wrote: »

Got a Bravia myself and the USB viewer supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 and exFAT file systems.

Hard luck, if the drive is NTFS formatted.

Hard drives can be reformatted to FAT32

Torqay

doctorg wrote: »

Hard drives can be reformatted to FAT32

You don't say...

But you can't convert from NTFS to FAT32, so you better back up the drive first.

Besides, NTFS is safer, faster and the file size is not limited to 4 GB, so DVD or even BR images are out of the question, which takes a lot of fun out of a multimedia drive.

Keith186

As fionny said I'd say its more a case that the TV won't play a proper hard drive. The usb ports generally don't have enough power output for the hard drive. Some do though so you will have to experiment maybe...

Small USB flash drive should work though, copy stuff over to it and give it a try if you have one.

Torqay

Keith186 wrote: »

The usb ports generally don't have enough power output for the hard drive.

Well, 3.5" HDDs have their own power supply. My money is on the file system.

I have gotten around it with a WD TV Live, not only does it read NTFS, it also supports a lot more media file formats than SONY's built-in player and it plays DVD images (ISO) from the hard disk. 80 yoyos well spent.

RUCKING FETARD

Torqay wrote: »

Well, 3.5" HDDs have their own power supply. My money is on the file system.

I have gotten around it with a WD TV Live, not only does it read NTFS, it also supports a lot more media file formats than SONY's built-in player and it plays DVD images (ISO) from the hard disk. 80 yoyos well spent.

What made you go for one of them???

Why not ATV or....something that can handle XBMC?


XBMC is available for Android now, should be some new boxes (dirt cheap?) coming on the back of that soon?

yoyo

RUCKING FETARD wrote: »

What made you go for one of them???

Why not ATV or....something that can handle XBMC?


XBMC is available for Android now, should be some new boxes (dirt cheap?) coming on the back of that soon?

The ATV is probably the worst choice, no usb port...

Nick

Torqay

RUCKING FETARD wrote: »

What made you go for one of them???

Oh, I bought the WD TV Live over 2 years ago, Android was a PoS at the time, wouldn't play AVI properly, never mind MP4 or MKV.

RUCKING FETARD

yoyo wrote: »

The ATV is probably the worst choice, no usb port...

Nick

But crack it and stick icefilms, navix, sickbeard or whatever on it, internet allowing.

Torqay wrote: »

Oh, I bought the WD TV Live over 2 years ago, Android was a PoS at the time, wouldn't play AVI properly, never mind MP4 or MKV.

ah right.

-( i )- Wicker

Torqay wrote: »

But you can't convert from NTFS to FAT32, so you better back up the drive first.

Besides, NTFS is safer, faster and the file size is not limited to 4 GB, so DVD or even BR images are out of the question, which takes a lot of fun out of a multimedia drive.

I had a similar issue when setting up my external HD with my ps3. More than 50% of the hard drive was free so I created a FAT32 partition on the half that was free and left the NTFS partition as it was with the data still intact. Then just copied over whatever I needed to the FAT32 partition.