Can I connect an external hard drive to my tv via usb and play movies?

If your tv has media share or allshare like Samsung it will see the canvio toshiba drive and play anything on it,I have a new samsung with allshare and a 3 year old both play everything pretty much I have on my WD essentials usb3.0 toshiba and seagate all 1tb drives and all were plug and play.I just watched A SBS 3D movie from my External drive without issue and it looked amazing.Samsung E8000.Also works well on my panasonic 65in.But my mitsubishi only plays songs and pics so it depends on the TV not the drive.And the usb 3.0 won't be a big speed difference as most TVs are usb 2.0 logic board types.

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Can I connect an external hard drive to my tv via usb and play movies?

I'm looking at a toshiba 3.0 1TB portable external hard drive formatted NTFS. I would like to put .mp4 and .mkv movies files on and watch them on my tv using the usb port on the tv. Will this work? Will I need to reformat the hard drive? I'm still new to this, please help. :)

Some televisions do not handle USB hard drives. Flash drives are fine but there is something different about hard drives.

You might be better off with a small box like the Western Digital TV Live box. This will work with a USB hard drive and it has much better support for most file types. Note: .mkv files are container files like a zip file so the device has to un-pack the file and then hopefully be able to play the internal AVI, WMV, MPG, etc. My WD box has handled the .mkv files I fed it just fine.

The WD box runs about $99 and does handle USB 2.0 hard drives. I do not know if it is compatible with a USB 3.0 drive.

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Yes if your tv has usb media player built in,most new tvs do if yours does it will play flash drives external HDD direct camera usb Again if your tv has the capability look in the manual or online.My new samsung plays every file I have tried so far.If your tv doesn't have video player then you need a media player i.e. Wd live,Roku.boxee. any stand alone media box with usb support.

Hi. I just came across your post. I have my movies on an external WD 1tb drive for mac. Do I need to take movies out of the folders that they are in to read them or can I leave them in the folders. I have one movie without a folder, and it picked it up immediately. (I connected the drive to a roku box, tv wouldn't show it. It said there was nothing connected in the usb port). When we tried a movie in a folder, it said "loading" for quite some time. My husband backed out of the folder.

Any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!

No format needed just load movies and go.But your tv needs to have the usb video option,some tvs only play audio and pictures through usb.

No format needed on the toshiba drive but the tv has to recognize movie files on its usb input.Or like others said you 'll need a STb or HTPC.