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Question

Playback of movies from External Hard Drive

Jul 16, 2011 4:43PM PDT

I wanted to download movies to a 3TB External Hard Drive so i can bring it to work on night shifts and hook it up to the 50' Plasma moniters there. I currently have a DVD player and computer speakers that i use. My question is what is the simplest, least expensive way to playback the movies there at work and also will it work easily for me with my TV at home?

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: movies from external hard drive
Jul 16, 2011 7:50PM PDT

That depends on some things.

You might be able to burn that movies to DVD in a format that's recognised by a standard DVD-player. That's a rather time-consuming thing. A free program to try is DVD Flick.
You might be able to use a laptop or desktop at work that can you can use to play that movie directly from the external drive. That's much easier. A second hand PC wouldn't be too expensive. And maybe there's already one available?

At home use any PC or laptop that has video output that matches with the video input of your TV. Using hdmi on both with a simple hdmi cable (a few meters) is the easily the easiest.

Kees

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Playback of movies from External Hard Drive
Jul 16, 2011 11:31PM PDT

In the past i've used my cousin's WD My Passport...not sure which model but i know it's less than 1TB. In any case he just had to plug the Hard Drive into his Phillips DVD player which had a USB port in front and he was able to scroll thru the movies he had downloaded right on the TV screen with the DVD players remote, which is the easiest for me to do....at work at least. I was thinking of going this route to begin with so i wouldn't have to keep renting DVD's at work, thinking i could just download everything the same way he did but in a Hard Drive with alot more memory? As you can tell i'm not a big techie or anything so i appreciate the input.

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Re: playback of movies
Jul 17, 2011 4:25AM PDT