[John-W]

I recently purchased a Panasonic Viera TV (TX-L37V20B). I am disappointed with the restriction imposed on the use of an external USB HDD by the Media Player facility.

The Viera Media Player supports playing of a wide range of audio, image and video files, including DivX HD (but not, apparently DivX Plus HD / MKV). Such files can be read from an SD Card or USB Flash Memory, but not from a USB HDD.

The Media Player does allow access to video recordings on a USB HDD, but only from a HDD which has been ‘registered’ for use with the same TV, ie. only video files created by the specific TV may be played by Media Player. Panasonic has, for whatever marketing reason, prevented interchange of USB HDDs between other Viera TVs and also PCs. (See also Panasonic Viera TV USB HDD PVR: Supported drives & PC access to recordings? )

There would seem to be no technical reason why audio, image and video files could not be played by the Viera Media Player from a USB HDD, provided an appropriate file system, eg. NTFS, was supported.

So, why has Panasonic not included this extremely useful functionality? After all, Panasonic does not market a standalone USB Media Player, eg. like the Western Digital TV Media Player range, or the Sony SMP-U10 USB Media Player.

It is regretable that Panasonic has imposed this restriction. As a consequence I shall be forced to use a separate USB Media Player with this TV.

[Bastl]

I came here from your other thread, and since you registered in 2005 or so, I hope that bumping this will work.

I am running in exactly your problems with an GT30.

I bought a nice 2,5" with 500GB, and would like to view my private photo collection etc.

Using the drive for HDD-recording works as expected, but I cannot access it otherwise.

How did you work around this? Are there drives nowadays that are supported for *reading* by panasonic?

Is there an alternate firmware that allows for that?

Thanks, Bastl.

[Bastl]

Doh, with ubuntu I reformatted the partition to ntfs and fat, but I did not delete it. Somehow there were still things of the UFS-experiments left.

With a clean formatted ntfs drive (not only the partition) my GT30 plays everything that's listed....

[kpdubbya]

Hi, interesting reading.

My issue at the moment is with my Viera TV's USB drive (a Seagate Goflex 1tb) I formatted it successfully from my GT30 and all was working well. However, I took the drive out and plugged it into my Win laptop (just to see if anything was viewable from it) and on plugging it back in to the same TV USB port, it now lists my drive as 'USB 2.0 Cable'.

It's now non-recordable and I can't even select it to reformat from the TV. I've tried it with Ubuntu as well but it doesn't see anything (which is odd given that the Mac does, (perhaps it's because I'm running Ubuntu from the disc). Plugging in the USB drive into my Mac I can see both this partition and the main drive from the Disk Utility app, but I can't reformat it with the Mac either.

How can I reformat the whole drive and start again?
Anyone else had this issue?

And finally...
Help!!

[Mark uk]

I unplugged my HDD from the TV and then tried it on my PC, from what I can make out the drive is formatted in such a way that windows cant read it and saw no contents.
To re-install the HDD on the TV I just started again as though I was putting a new drive on and it registered and wiped the HDD clean like a new one.
As for the USB restriction I view divx video on USB through a Panasonic blu-ray player port or through my Panasonic HDD.
The restriction is probably there to make you buy further squipment or is it complying with some 'standard'?
I dont think high defenition content is supposed to be portable?
Although I have a network the HDD and its contents have never been visible on any other devices than the 'paired' tv.
Never tried putting any pictures etc on the HDD.