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.
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.