# Using an external hard drive to play music and video



## Steeve-O

Hi all,

I have an Onkyo TX SR-608, a Panasonic DMB-BD85 blueray and an Xbox 360. I currently use a USB key that I have put some music on it to listen on my HT. I plug it into my Panasonic blueray player for now. For music it work flawlessly and it can even read folded. I have tried to put some video in MPEG format on it but the blueray player wont see them.

I just bought an external hard drive that I would like too hook on the home theater for music essentially but also video and photo. What I want to know to what I should format my external hard drive, FAT32, NTFS ? Also what video format I should be using to be able to read them with the blueray player. I could also hook it to the Xbox 360 but I would prefer to hook it to the blueray player since it would alow me to use a single remote.

This will not be my permanent setup because I will probably move this summer and have a HT room or an HT living room with a HTPC for that purpose. But for now that all I have space for.

Thank You
Steeve


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## torceador

Steeve-O,

I have done the same thing. I have a Sony Blu-Ray. I have a USB flash drive I can insert in the back. It will display pictures just fine, but will not do mpegs. HOWEVER, it will play .mts files from my HD camera in full HD with blew me away.

torceador


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## Harpmaker

From what I have been able to discover the Panasonic DMB-BD85 will only see a USB external hard drive up to 128 GB in size. This is very limiting if one wants to use the drive for video playback. I could find no info on whether the Panasonic DMB-BD85 can see NTFS formatted drives or not, but I would assume FAT32 would work.

As for video formats for movies on HDD or flash devices your best bet seems to be to use Divx. Xvid works as well, but has some problems. Aspect ratio problems can occur with this player when video is played back via flash or USB.


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## Steeve-O

My external hard drive is 500 Gb. I don't know if I can part it in 128Gb and remaining size if it would work... I bet I'm better to hook it to my Xbox 360.

It's mainly for music used and small video use, not movie since I own most of my movie on DVD and Blueray.


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## Steeve-O

Is someone aware of a converter that is free preferably and that can convert must video format to Dvix quite fast ?


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## Harpmaker

Steeve-O said:


> Is someone aware of a converter that is free preferably and that can convert must video format to Dvix quite fast ?


Right now I'm using SUPER © Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer available for free here. There is also MediaCoder available here for free. I haven't used either of them much lately so I can't really compare them. I think SUPER is easiest to install, but both are so powerful it will take a bit of experimentation to learn them. SUPER is all in one package while MediaCoder offers several add-on packs and optimizations.


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## ojojunkie

Got WD HDTV to play music, jpeg slide show and almost all video versions from 1 TB ext. drive without any problem.


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