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eljanitor

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 10, 2011
411
20
I'm a long time Mac User, and I recently came across a Sharp flat screen TV that lets you play media like movies right to your TV Via USB!

At first I thought it was terrific, until my sister came over with all these home movies that she had converted to digital. First problem was that the TV couldn't see her hard drive. It's not that her Hard drive wasn't working it's that it wasn't formatted FAT, or NTFS 3G.

Unfortunately she will never format a hard drive FAT, or anything else in a Windows compatible PC style because she hates PC's and only uses Mac.

So I get small USB drive and its formatted FAT and it works, well at least it sees the drive. Oddly enough that's just not going to be good enough for what we wanted because now the movies are formatted .mpg, and the TV wont recognize that video format. I noticed that if its .flv they play, so anything not formatted properly wont play.

I'm not so sure why they did this, but it definitely lacks universal compatibility for media, which is something that the average person needs, because they don't know how to convert files, let alone format a disk. I tried playing other movies on other TV's Ive come across when I can, and it turns out some don't support any type of media play via USB because they lack the application to do so, and so on.

So much for never having to buy a DVD or Blu-Ray player ever again.
 

12dylan34

macrumors 6502a
Sep 3, 2009
884
15
I got a Samsung TV and returned it for this very reason. They're all about advertising how it plays your own media, but it doesn't really work at all or very well. It leads me to believe they just do a half-assed job so that they can print it on the box and sell a few more units.
 

floh

macrumors 6502
Nov 28, 2011
460
2
Stuttgart, Germany
Oddly enough that's just not going to be good enough for what we wanted because now the movies are formatted .mpg, and the TV wont recognize that video format. I noticed that if its .flv they play, so anything not formatted properly wont play.

So, do you have a specific question for us? Or did you just want to blow off some steam? :) Very understandable, I was disappointed with my BluRay player that was supposed to be able to play back movie files but wouldn't recognize many file types.

The problem for me though was mostly that the player did not accept the video container (.m4v, .wmv, ...) but was fine with the codec. For that (and some more reasons) I wrote this little program that will not change the encoding of the video but only the container, so it will be lossless and very fast. I just batch-changed e.g. all my .m4v to .mp4 containers and can now play them back. Maybe this helps you if you don't want to return the thing anyways?

By the way, it is very common that standalone devices (non-computers) will only read FAT formatted drives. Sadly, MacOS X, Windows, and Linux do not have a proper file system format that they can all read and write nicely. The very old and sucky FAT is the only one that can be dealt with naturally by all three. That is also why almost all USB keys and even many external hard drives are formatted in FAT (or extended FAT if they are big). You are gonna have to live with that. MacOS Journaled is a very usable file system, but so is NTFS and ext4, but none of them are usable without problem on the other operating systems...

So, apart from that... any more questions?
 

nateo200

macrumors 68030
Feb 4, 2009
2,906
42
Upstate NY
Their are many reasons to format maybe a drive as dual partitions with 100GBs that are ExFAT and 400GB that are Mac OS X Journaled. Thats what I do so I can share data off my scratch drive with windows users. I do this on most of my drives..never know when you might need it.
 

eljanitor

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 10, 2011
411
20
It really doesn't phase me too much, if I have time Ill just reformat the video to whatever the proper format is and put it on a FAT or NTFS hard drive. However I did run across a problem that kinda makes me a bit mad.

I changed a video on my mac from .flv to .m4v using handbrake, and the Mac wont let me put the file on a FAT or NTFS hard drive now?
 

floh

macrumors 6502
Nov 28, 2011
460
2
Stuttgart, Germany
However I did run across a problem that kinda makes me a bit mad.

I changed a video on my mac from .flv to .m4v using handbrake, and the Mac wont let me put the file on a FAT or NTFS hard drive now?

I think to have a correct analysis, we at least need some sort of error message your computer is giving you.

This almost certainly has nothing to do with the file format, since the file system really doesn't care about that. My first guess would be: The file is bigger than 4 GB. This will not fit on a FAT formatted drive. It should fit on an NTFS drive, but depending on the NTFS driver you use, it will maybe refuse to do that, too. Other than that, I can hardly think of a proper reason without an error message.

If that really is your problem, try to take a look at the file size of the .flv before the Handbrake conversion. If that is smaller than 4GB and the conversion blew up the file, you converted it in a strange way. But you can easily give handbrake the needed options, or (as I said before) just change the container format to keep it the same size.

Are you sure your player will work with .m4v containers? Because my standalone player doesn't. Did you read my last reply? About containers and codecs? It might be the language barrier (I'm not a native English speaker), but your statements seem a little hectic and confused to me. Try to calm down. We'll get there. Describe your exact problem and question.

Sorry if this sounds condescending, it's really not meant that way, I'm just trying to help you but don't really understand what you did...
 
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