Question Smart tv external hard drive

uperkurk

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Hello. I want to buy a new TV and I'll buy an external hard drive so I can download all my movies and tv shows onto the drive and then connect it to my TV and watch them on that.

My question is, what format do the movies need to be in? Sometimes my movies are mkv, mp4, avi etc so I'm not sure. I just play them all with VLC.

Thanks.
 
In my experience (Samsung Smart TV) you can't do this?

If you connect an external HDD to a smart TV, it will want to format it to its own file system, the HDD cannot then be used for anything other than recording stuff from the TV's own tuner.

What you need is a NAS. The TV can then stream stuff from that using it's inbuilt media player.
 
So with a NAS (what does this stand for?) can I still download movies to it? If it's anything like streaming online is then all I'll get is a bad quality movie which takes 15 minutes to buffer.
 
NAS - Network Attached Storage.
Contains 1 or more hard drives (or bare unit to which you add your own hard drives), and has it's own built in microprocessor and media interface. It's connected directly to your home network via Gigabit LAN so no lag. You copy stuff onto it via a PC and any device in the network can then access it as necessary. Streaming to media devices is done via DLNA
 
Here's an example ready to go single drive unit

WD My Cloud 2TB Personal Cloud Storage 1 Bay All In One NAS Drive with GbE Ethernet - WDBCTL0020HWT-EESN - Scan.co.uk

and a bare unit to which you add your own drives

D-Link ShareCenter Pulse DNS-320 NAS Box 2 Bay SATA 12 in 1 SATA Gigabit Printserver PC/MAC/Linux - Scan.co.uk

You need to determine what capacity you need for storage.

Alternatively, you could obtain a media PC and then use portable USB hard drives to store and stream you stuff from via the PC
 
Thanks. So I just connect that NAS device to my network and transfer my movies in any format to the device and then from my TV I can browse the NAS device, select what movie I want and just watch it?

Is it possible to organise things into folders like tv series etc? So I can easily navigate directly to the episode I want?
 
Basically, yes.

You need the movies in a format supported by the TV - mine plays MKV fine.

Putting them into named folders is fine as well. I have Music Videos, TV shows, Movies, Comedy shows etc
 
Hello. I want to buy a new TV and I'll buy an external hard drive so I can download all my movies and tv shows onto the drive and then connect it to my TV and watch them on that.

My question is, what format do the movies need to be in? Sometimes my movies are mkv, mp4, avi etc so I'm not sure. I just play them all with VLC.

Thanks.
This will depend on the TV you buy and should be detailed in the manual.

My Panasonic GT 60 will play pretty much anything I've thrown at it.

It will format a disk for making recordings off the internal tuners and that cannot have any other files at all for playing on it. But it will also accept any USB stick or hard drive attached to play files (it has 3 usb ports) at the same time... and can also do it from a network drive or from PC streaming files to it.

BUT the devil is in the detail and it all depends on which TV you but as to what it will and will not do,
 

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