Playing hd files through hard drive on Sony TV

cheqmate06

Was looking to see if anyone can help me with this. I have a 1tb WD hard drive attached to my Sony Bravia tv. It is formatted to NTFS. The tv has a built in media player and plays all my files with ease. The problem is i have recently put some hd films on the hard drive hoping these would play through the tv. Nope. I can see the files on the drive when i connect it to my laptop but its invisible when i go through the video menu on the tv. All these files are greater than 4 gb.

Thanks in advance.

Cheqmate06

chewynut

What format are the films in?

I can hook my ext. hard drive up to my Blu-Ray player but it's picky about what it'll play. It doesn't like some .AVI files but I think it's okay with .MKV.

cheqmate06

after looking at the files that aren't appearing on tv it seems they are mkv files. it plays avi files fine so think mine may do opposite of ours.

chewynut

There should be something in your TV manual that will tell you which file extensions it can recognise. I'm not sure what you can do to get it to play MKV files; do you have any video converting software?

epninety

Just tried a 1080p MP4 file on a USB stick on my Bravia and that played fine.
Are they HD recordings from another TV or DVR by any chance - if so they (probably) won't play due to the copy protection scheme.

almillar

The only place to find the right answer really is the TV's manual. Each model brought out each year will read different partition types (FAT/NTFS etc) and different file types (AVI, DIVx) with lots of different settings within them (video/audio settings). You need to find a format that's right for your TV and stick with that.

zaax

The are very few window players that will play .MKV files let alone TV's. .MKV as it is normally used for bluray films. See the manual that came with the TV to see what formats it will play and use a convertor to covert to that format.