PLAY VIDEOS FROM YOUR USB STICK ON YOUR TV
Free software such as Universal Media Server (see Issue 598, page 18) lets you stream video, photos and music from your PC to your TV. Streaming in this way isn’t always ideal, though. You’ll need to have your PC switched on to access your content and slow Wi-fi can cause video to buffer. A more reliable alternative is to copy your content to a USB stick, then insert this into a USB port on your TV. As well as not having to rely on Wi-fi, this means you could take the USB stick with you when travelling away from home (as soon as that’s allowed again).
Not all TVS let you play media from a USB stick, but if your TV has a menu option such as Media or USB, there’s a good chance it will. Manufacturers also frequently update their TVS to improve USB playback. In November last year, Sony released a firmware update for its Android-based TVS (those built from 2016 onwards) that enabled them to play HEVC video files (the format used by iphones and ipads). If you have a compatible Sony TV, the update should install automatically, but you can also download it from www.snipca. com/37284.
Our old Sony TV is incompatible with this particular update, but it still managed to play most media formats once we’d formatted our USB stick. When we first inserted the stick, our TV simply refused to recognise it. After a little research, we discovered that the TV won’t work with sticks formatted using Microsoft’s NTFS file system (this dictates how data is stored on USB sticks and hard drives).
To fix this, we had to format the stick using the older but more widely supported EXFAT file system. To do this, insert the USB stick into your PC, right-click it in File Explorer, then select ‘Format..’. In the Format window, select ‘EXFAT’ (see screenshot left), then click Start to proceed with reformatting. After inserting our stick into the TV and selecting Media in the menu, we managed to access all media files contained on it.
Not all TVS let you use their USB port in this way. If you have one of these, read our How To on page 35, where we show you how to load your media on to an Amazon Fire Stick instead.