Let’s say you see a great movie or nice music on a friend’s computer, or you downloaded a movie on your mobile phone or computer and you prefer to watch it on a TV screen, all you would need to do is to transfer the content using a USB drive or an external disk. But you will face difficulties if your USB drive or external disk is not FAT32 formatted. Although some flash disks come with this file system by default. In case your flash disk is not FAT32 formatted, you will have to format it on a windows operating system to automatically set it to FAT32.
How to format Flash disk to Play on TV
- Plug the flash disk into a computer running on a Windows operating system.
- Go to “my computer”, right-click and choose format.
- Select the file system from the drop-down – choose FAT32 or NTFS.
NOTE– FAT32 and NTFS are similar because they are both from Microsoft. The only difference is that NTFS supports bigger file sizes (16TB), while FAT32 supports a maximum file size of 4GB.
Other things to note:
- To connect Flash disk to your TV and have access to contents, your TV must have at least one USB port. USB ports on TV’s are mostly situated at the back or side of a TV.
- You also need to read the user manual of your TV to know the file format is supports, most recent TV’s support both the FAT32 and the NTFS file format both there are still certain old TV’s that do not support FAT32 and NTFS file format.
- Most TV’s recognize and support video format like; MP3 and MP4, others might not support formats like; MKV, Ogg or audio files.
- Also, if you have too many files on your flash disk or external drive, your TV might find it difficult to browse through your files. It’ll become slow and frustrating.
