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whoathere

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 8, 2006
356
3
Rockford, IL
Not sure if this is the correct forum, but I have an odd issue and I'm wondering if anyone has a solution.

I put together a presentation in keynote, and took screenshots of everyslide and stuck them on a USB drive. When my friend plugs in the USB to the back of the TV's located in her offices, the JPEGs will play fine, but then it will show blank slides. It is a 19 slide (jpeg) presentation that will loop, but after the 19 jpegs, 19 black screens will scroll before restarting the loop. I thought maybe there were hidden files, so I reformatted each drive, yet we still have the problem.

Any body have any clue how to accomplish this? The TV has the capability, as shown by being able to produce the 19 slides we want to show, but we're not sure what the issue is with the 19 blank screens that follow.

This is a dental office, and none of the TV's are hooked up to computers or a network, just indiviual cable outlets. So running from a DVD or a hub of some sort isn't applicable.

PS when I try this on my samsung TV, it just shows the slides and nothing else.

Please let me know of any suggestions!
 

xraydoc

Contributor
Oct 9, 2005
10,799
5,261
192.168.1.1
MacOS X has a habit of placing invisible files beginning with a "." then the rest of the file name that matches the visible files. It'll do this on FAT-formated drives, like a USB flash drive, because FAT doesn't support some of OSX's file format features.

Since these are normally invisible to you when using the device on an OSX machine, you'll never know they are there.

Two things you can do - one is to pop the USB thumb drive in to a Windows PC (or a Virtual Machine on your Mac running an OS other than MacOS X) and manually delete the "invisible" files. It should then run without blanks on the TV. Don't plug the drive back in to your Mac after you delete these extra files or you may end up with additional ones.

The other option is to Google something like "unhide invisible files MacOS X" and follow the steps. There's both GUI apps and command line methods. This may require more effort than you're comfortable with, but it'll work well if you don't have easy access to a Windows PC.

It's a sometimes annoying side-effect of using FAT-formatted devices on OSX.
 
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