Question

Play Movies on TV from External Hard Drive

Asked by: Marina2006

My sister already has a good Television DVD recorder but it does not have does not support DivX or Xvid playback. She also has an external hard drive with large storage capacity.
IF I get her a good quality DVD Player which supports DivX or Xvid playback with a USB connection can she play movies such as those with an .avi file format from her external hard drive through her DVD player on her TV?

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Asked On
2007-06-20 at 10:53:49ID22646604
Tags

tv

,

hard

,

external

,

drive

,

play

,

PCMCIA

Topics

General Laptop

,

DVD Players & Recorders

,

Computer Hard Drives

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
2

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Answers

 

by: garycasePosted on 2007-06-21 at 00:34:54ID: 19331153

No.  The players that support DivX will play DivX movies recorded on a DVD ... but not through the USB connection.   The USB connection is (in every case I'm aware of) for a flash card reader, camera, or portable digital audio player => and is designed to play music or view photos on the TV.

If her computer has a video output compatible with the TV, you could connect the TV as an external monitor for the computer and play DivX, Xvid, etc. movies using the computer.   Then you could use the external hard disk as the storage medium for all of the movies.   But this does require the ability to connect the PC to the TV ... so it very much depends on the capabilities of the PC's graphics adapter and the inputs available on the TV.

 

by: T-CornettPosted on 2010-06-23 at 11:57:39ID: 33057817

Actually Philips and LG have come out with several DVD Players that support External Hard Drives using USB. They allow playback of of AVI, DIVX and WMV video files. They are usually limited to the FAT32 file system though.

A better alternative is the Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player WDBABF0000NBK-NESN
box. It allows you to attach up to 2 external drives, I currently have two 1 TB drives attached to mine. The drives can be formated to NTFS so all space is usable.

The player can connect to the TV using HDMI or Composite cables. It supports the following formats:

Video: AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, VC-1), TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), M2TS, WMV9

Photo: JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG

Audio: MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS

Playlist: PLS, M3U, WPL

Subtitle: SRT, ASS, SSA, SUB, SMI


Thanks,

Terry C

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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