Sony bravia smart tv not recognising external hard drive

[ewan07]

Hi All,

I hope someone can help me. I have a new sony bravia smart tv and I am trying to connect it to an external hard drive to watch videos. From the instructions i have on the tv it says just plug it into the usb port and hit play - it will autimatically recognise the devise.

However, the tv is not even recognising that there is an external hard drive attached?

Do I need to format the external hard drive before I put videos on it? If so can anyone tell me how to do this?

I have taken the videos from my PC and read somewhere that the external drive can only be used for the pc or the tv but not both? Is this true? When on the PC I was playing the video's using both windows media player and VLC media player.

Any solutions much appreciated.

Thanks,

Ewan

[Bravia55HX]

Hi,

unfortunately you cant view the files on your drive using the tv, since many use drives like this for recording from the tv and in order to do this you must format the drive to FAT32.

there is a way round this and thats to use a media server like Serviio or Sony's Homestream (which basically is the same) and in the library you can add the drive and access it from the server on your pc or laptop and watch them on your tv, media player is fine but has a limited file type you can play.

you should know that if you format the drive and register it to your tv you cannot use it anywhere else other than the tv.

[mariano.rocchi]

I don't mind that I can't record to an external HD from the Bravia. I would like to reproduce movies already present in the HD. Is it possible? Samsung does it. In addition, I found that if I connect the external HD to the USB port of my Samsung blu-ray, I can play the any movie. Unfortunately the blu-ray player does not read the 4k movies. I can do that from my Macbook... 

if I had known this limitation I would not have bought this Bravia TV.

Mariano

[____Telly]

Sorry, but you've found one of the many limitations built in to the Sony Bravia range. Should you want to record to HDD, you can't in YouView mode. So, it's a good job you don't want to! You can watch catch-up or you can record to HDD but you can't do both without switching between YouView and Freeview EPGs. If you've not had the TV long, take it back. Don't expect it to get better - it won't!