{"id":250,"date":"2015-02-26T13:19:58","date_gmt":"2015-02-26T13:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/?p=250"},"modified":"2015-07-14T17:08:42","modified_gmt":"2015-07-14T16:08:42","slug":"usb-playback-problems-on-samsung-tvs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/usb-playback-problems-on-samsung-tvs\/","title":{"rendered":"USB playback problems on Samsung TVs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My dad has a Samsung Smart TV (UE55H6400) which he uses mostly as a display device for his Sky+ box; the advanced features of the TV are a little beyond him.<\/p>\n<p>Recently though, he&#8217;s been asking for a way to play movies locally. When we met for lunch,\u00a0I gave him\u00a0an 8 GB USB flash\u00a0drive with some films and later, over the phone, I walked him through selecting the USB device for playback using the Samsung TV remote.<\/p>\n<p>This should have been straightforward &#8211; it certainly is on my older Samsung TV. But no dice &#8211; whatever we tried, his TV wouldn&#8217;t recognize the flash drive. There are three USB ports, including one labelled &#8220;USB HDD&#8221; but it made no difference which one we used.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps I had accidentally formatted the flash\u00a0drive using NTFS instead of FAT32? My mum, who is a lot more computer literate than my dad, plugged the flash drive into their PC and I examined it using Remote Desktop. Sure enough, it was formatted as NTFS. While the newest Samsungs can handle this fine, my Dad&#8217;s model is a few years old so conceivably it was expecting FAT32.<\/p>\n<p>Copying the movies to the PC, reformatting the drive, and copying them back again took about 20 minutes (cheap USB flash drives are SLOW). Ultimately, it made no difference &#8211; the TV still refused to recognize the drive. We gave it up as a bad job.<\/p>\n<p>A week later, I was visiting and had a chance to try it myself &#8211; exactly the same results. At least user error wasn&#8217;t to blame.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually we figured it out &#8211; it&#8217;s rather obscure! It seems that at least some models of Samsung TV decide whether or not a USB device is &#8220;hard drive&#8221;-like based on the precise way it is formatted. A single partition doesn&#8217;t count; it needs to have a full partition table with multiple partitions for the TV to recognize it as a valid drive.<\/p>\n<p>How do you format it like this? The easiest option is to use a special tool like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rmprepusb.com\/documents\/rmprepusb-beta-versions\" target=\"_blank\">RMPrepUSB<\/a>\u00a0&#8211; download the latest version from the list on the home page.<\/p>\n<p>RMPrepUSB&#8217;s initial options\u00a0screen looks rather daunting:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-244\" src=\"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/RMPrepUSB.png\" alt=\"RMPrepUSB\" width=\"643\" height=\"553\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/RMPrepUSB.png 643w, http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/RMPrepUSB-300x258.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 643px) 100vw, 643px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not too bad though if you just follow through the\u00a0numbered sections:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Select your USB drive from the list at the top<\/li>\n<li>In section 2, type\u00a0a suitable Volume Label and set the partition as non-bootable<\/li>\n<li>In section 4,\u00a0select FAT32 and choose &#8220;Boot as HDD&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Click the Prepare Drive button at the bottom and off you go.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>After a brief delay, you&#8217;ll have a freshly formatted USB flash drive that is now recognized by your Samsung Smart TV. Copy movies, photos or music to it and have fun!<\/p>\n<p>I should emphasise that this only seems to be necessary for <strong>some<\/strong>\u00a0models of Samsung TV (and also, <a title=\"Whirlpool Australian AV forums\" href=\"http:\/\/forums.whirlpool.net.au\/archive\/2242414\" target=\"_blank\">reportedly, LG TVs<\/a>); it wasn&#8217;t needed for my own model.<\/p>\n<p>If RMPrepUSB seems a little too daunting, you could also try <a title=\"Download page for Rufus USB formatter\" href=\"https:\/\/rufus.akeo.ie\/\" target=\"_blank\">Rufus<\/a>\u00a0by Pete Batard of Akeo,\u00a0only up the road in Co. Donegal. While I haven&#8217;t had a chance to use it for this particular application yet, using the Advanced option &#8220;Add fixes for old BIOSes&#8221; option should have the same effect. Please <a href=\"mailto:eddy-blog@snoopdos.com\">let me know<\/a> if it works for you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My dad has a Samsung Smart TV (UE55H6400) which he uses mostly as a display device for his Sky+ box; the advanced features of the TV are a little beyond him. Recently though, he&#8217;s been asking for a way to play movies locally. When we met for lunch,\u00a0I gave him\u00a0an 8 GB USB flash\u00a0drive with &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/usb-playback-problems-on-samsung-tvs\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">USB playback problems on Samsung TVs<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268,"href":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions\/268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.snoopdos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}