Connecting External Hard Drive to TV

spillcoe

Just bought a new TV for myself, arriving tomorrow. Spec says it has a USB input. I'm just wondering can I connect an external hard drive to this and use it to watch films, tv shows etc? Would the quality be anyway reasonable and what kind of GUI can I expect?

If anyone has used these before I'd appreciate any feedback.

Overheal

**warning to anyone** that link is bandwidth heavy. PDF.

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USB (multimedia)
The USB connector allows access to jpeg photos, MP3 music and video files on most USB sticks (USB memory-class device). Plug the USB into the slot on the side of the TV and access the multimedia content using the easy on-screen content browser. You can now view and share your videos, photos and music.

Tuner/Reception/Transmission
•Aerial Input: 75 ohm coaxial (IEC75)
•TV system: PAL I, PAL B/G, PAL D/K, SECAM B/G, SECAM D/K, SECAM L/L', DVB COFDM 2K/8K
•Video Playback: NTSC, SECAM, PAL
•DVB: DVB-T MPEG4*, DVB-C MPEG4*
•Tuner bands: Hyperband, S-Channel, UHF, VHF

It seems as though you can. No idea about GUI. You are best to leave the video files in the Root Directory (G:\ etc) for best results. This wont play DivX or .wmv or anything like that: Your video files MUST be encoded as MPEG-4 (.mp4) files.

Download a sample mp4 from here and see if it works:

http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~burkardt/data/mp4/mp4.html

Also be prepared that the problem might be the external hard drive. While it is usually a Mass Storage class device, it still may be unsupported by the TV. For best results try a plain USB memory stick.

spillcoe

Thanks Overheal