My television does not read NTFS formatted flash drive
By Koalemos
@Asylum (47893)
Manchester, England
October 10, 2015 5:26pm CST
I have had my Sony Bravia television for a couple of years now and thought that I was fully aware of the features. The television has a USB port, in which I can plug a flash drive and play music or videos directly.
Recently I purchased a 64 Gb flash drive to store such data on Since FAT32 will not support files over 4 Gb, I chose to format it in NTFS just in case I ever had a large file to use on it.
When I plug a flash drive into the USB port my television displays “USB Device Detected” for a moment, but when I tried this drive it did not. Assuming it may not be connected properly I removed it and tried again, but still no response.
A quick check online revealed that televisions do not support NTFS, so I had to reformat it to FAT32 and transfer the data again. It comes as a surprise that I have not encountered this before.
2 people like this
3 responses
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
11 Oct 15
It was obvious to me because I have used a flash drive in my Sony Bravia many times, so this was the only possible reason. If I had tried a NTFS formatted drive as soon as I bought the television then I may not have realised and assumed that the USB was inoperative.
1 person likes this
@owlwings (43897)
• Cambridge, England
11 Oct 15
I wasn't aware of this either and the information is useful, since I am looking to buy a new television and one of the features I might be interested in is the ability to use a flash drive or external hard disk.
If you do ever have a video file which is larger than 4Gb and which you want to store on a FAT32 formatted disk, the trick is to split it as described here:
? Skip to Main Content HOMEGUIDESAll GuidesRooting Starters GuideHow to Root the Fire TVFire TV Serial Number DecoderDEALSAll Deals – Only App Deals – Only Free Coins & CreditsNEW APPSAll Featured New Apps & Games – Only Featured New Apps – Onl
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
11 Oct 15
Now that looks very interesting. I would never have thought about using a .rar file because I would not expect it to work. I must put a compressed file on my flash drive to check this out.
Strangely I can remotely open my computer from the television because I have it on my home network and it will read the videos and music on my computer, or I could also stream them directly from the computer. My C: drive is NTFS, so it is only a flash drive where the issue occurs.
@owlwings (43897)
• Cambridge, England
11 Oct 15
@Asylum I wouldn't expect it to work with an NTFS formatted external hard drive, either, though it might with one formatted as FAT32.
I think that the reason that it reads your C: drive is that it's the computer's operating system/BIOS that makes the drive visible so it is the computer that's reading the drive's index and is just receiving commands from the TV and sending the data requested. A flash drive (or an external hard disk) has no index reading firmware of its own and (at the moment) it's not worth building NTFS capability into a TV (there are possibly licensing issues?). I suspect that if you put your NTFS flash drive into the PC, the TV would be able to read it from there, though that wouldn't make a lot of sense because USB isn't very fast and you'd have the double delay of reading the flash drive and the computer-TV handshaking.
@GardenGerty (169406)
• United States
11 Oct 15
I am so far out of the loop on television and streaming, and roku and other data storage. I hope it works well for you.
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
11 Oct 15
It works very well. I have been using a flash drive in this way for years, which is very convenient. I only have to change the input via the remote to access the flash drive and I can play any video, music file or picture file on the television.
What I did not expect was that formatting the flash drive in NTFS would make it unreadable by the television.
