# USB Playback on TV



## Smeg-Reddwarf (May 17, 2018)

Hello all

This is my first post. I have limited hard-drive space on my Mac so am trying to put movies onto an external hard drive so the kids can play them back through the TV. I am literally ready to throw all the TV's and devices out the window!

I have three separate TV's with USB playback ability:

TEAC - LEV40GD3FHD
TCL - L32M11HD
AWA - MSDV2611-O3

I carefully moved all my movies onto the hard drive and nothing worked. From some googling established they couldn't use the Mac Format I had on the hard drive.

So reformatted after more reading to NFTS. Again, wouldn't work on any of the TV's although the TEAC did show the movie in the menu.

So more research and reformatted to FAT32. Again, wouldn't read on any of the TV's except the TEAC. It tells me when I hit play that video is not supported but the movie time counter is showing it is playing. 

When I read the TEAC manual it says on one page that both NFTS and FAT32 are supported, but on another says only FAT32. It then states that only supports FAT32 if the hard drive is 400GB or less. My hard-drive is 1TB.

The TCL manual is useless as it only says file formats it will read and they are all MPEG4 as per the manual. It says unsupported device for all formats. 

I cannot find the AWA manual anywhere but it is not allowing us to select the movie option on any formats. 

What else do I try?

Desperately need the hard drive space on my laptop and the movies are the major roadblock to reclaiming space.

Regards
Smeg


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## Stancestans (Apr 26, 2009)

I would say the external hdd is the problem here. Not ALL TVs will work with ALL usb drives. Many TVs are built to work with flash disks, and some can handle hard drives while some simply can't. I'm guessing your disk uses a USB 3.x interface while your TVs have a USB 2.0 interface. Even though USB 3.x is backward compatible with USB 2.0, sometimes the power provided by the USB 2.0 ports on the TVs is not enough to drive the external hdd. If your TVs have two usb ports, you can try using a Y-split cable plugged into both ports to give the extra power that may be required by the external drive. Sometimes it's not a problem with power, but the design of the TV. If the TV's firmware is not developed with the protocols and drivers needed to handle external hard disks, then no amount of tinkering will get it to work with your external hard drive. You may have better luck using a flash disk for playback of SUPPORTED media formats on the TVs and use the external hdd for storage of said media to free up the space on your Mac.


About the unsupported video format, it could be a problem with the video resolution and not the format. If your TVs cannot handle UHD resolutions, for example, and the format is supported, then it will throw the same error about unsupported video format. Also, the container (file format) could be mp4, but the video inside it could be of a proprietary implementation of mpeg4, for example Divx, and your tv may only support h264 content.


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## Smeg-Reddwarf (May 17, 2018)

Yeah that's the realisation I'm coming to as well. The HDD I'm using is a 1TB with its own power source but is definitely a USB 2.0. I'll keep playing until I find the resolution! This will not beat me - there are three TV's one has to work sometime!!


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