Bravia 40ex723 and usb drive

[bohboh]

I have a 300gb seagate external hard drive. I have formatted it as fat32 yet the tv wont recognise it. I have seen from the compatibility list that it only has sony own hard drives listed. Does this mean I cannot use "any" usb hard drive?

[bohboh]

Is there a guide as to organising the files? the help page isnt all that helpful.

e.g. I have an empty fat32 formatted drive, and a file called family.avi. Where do i put this file?

[DamacizSi]

I will look in Instruction manual of HDD.... pdf. or support page for Your HDD brand. Click Your model on internet. I am quite sure You will find such or simular instruction there.

R

Damac

[bohboh]

No, my question is, does the TV expect the files to be in folders, if so do the folders need to be named something special?

[DamacizSi]

No special name needed, just sort fails in folders. Via drag and drop You could transfer all folder if Your files are in folders on PC. Allso you told as that Your fails are AVI. So, AVI is container and we still do not have info about format of Your fails via Media info. Are thay Divx or Xvid with extension .avi

If so, they will be supported on Your Bravia 2011. When You have time to give as media info for atleast one of Your avi fails.

http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en/Download

R

Damac

[DamacizSi]

Very good info Quic.

Regards

Damac

[DamacizSi]

I am glad to announce firmware we are waiting for

http://support.sony-europe.com/tvhc/downloads/downloads.aspx?site=odw_en_GB&f=FW_Bravia_3121EUA&m=KD...

Regards

Damac

[bohboh]

My TV seemed to have already updated itself. Cool!

[DamacizSi]

[Quick.Response]

Could it be down to the filesystem that you have on the HDD?

It sounds like the TV knows that the HDD is present and online due to the fact that it is offering you the chance to register it for recording. If you register it for recording it places it's own filesystem and partition structures down onto the disk. This is then how it can recognise that it is linked to the TV that it was registered to.

When you want to play videos off the device the TV has to be able to understand the filesystem that stores the video files, else it simply wont know how to locate, read and decode the data stored in each of the videos. The most common filesystem for embedded devices (because no royalties or licenses are involved) is the original FAT filesystem. This was then updated to allow for larger capacity drives to FAT32. Some of the newer Windows OS's have stopped offering FAT / FAT32 as an option when you choose to format the drive. There are tools available for download such as 'HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool' that allow external USB storage to be formatted with the older filesystems.

Failing that, i'd try a smaller USB pen drive with a simple mpeg2 video, to try and eliminate either the device as being the issue, or the videos that you are trying to playback on the TV.

[65hx923_cust11]

If you want to play a file then it should be on a disk which has FAT file system. The TV will not read from any other file system like NTFS. If you have a readable file system disk then the TV will play the file. It does not matter which usb input you connect it to.

For recording you will need to register the HDD and the file system will not be FAT because it cannot store files larger than 2GB. As soon as this happened then the disk will be unreadable by the TV but not by the recording. The TV will recognise that the HDD is there but will not be able to read. The TV will be able to record and play from it using the recording menu not the play pictures, music video menu.

If your disk uses FAT file system and the TV is not able to play from it then it might be that the disk does not use MBR, memory boot record structure. It might be using GPT, GUID partition table. The solution for that then would be converting from GPT to MBR check the web how to do this. Be careful because this conversion will ERASE ALL the data in the disk.