Flash drive and HDTV

[cahlton]

I want to buy a flash drive, load it with some movies, and give it to my wife's mother so she can watch them on her HDTV. The drive I have in mind is a Kingston 3.0 32 gig model. I phoned the company to confirm that the drive would play movies back smoothly and was told that there are too many variables and "it's impossible to know." I was curious to know what the experiences of people here have been with playing video files on their TV using a USB drive.

 

[SumnerH]

The USB stick will be fine.
 
Smart TVs generally have pretty limited codec support, so you'll need to verify that the encodings of all the movies you copy will work on that TV (and if not, transcode them to something it understands).

 

[NJ_Sox_Fan]

Depends on her tv. My Sharp 80" downstairs plays anything (any format). My older bedroom TV will not play mkv files.

 

[SumnerH]

Depends on her tv. My Sharp 80" downstairs plays anything (any format).

 
I guarantee you that's not true.  Even most smart TVs that play mkvs only play a few codecs, and there are plenty of weird video formats out there beyond mkv.

 

[cahlton]

Thanks for these helpful replies; really appreciate them.

 

[NJ_Sox_Fan]

I guarantee you that's not true.  Even most smart TVs that play mkvs only play a few codecs, and there are plenty of weird video formats out there beyond mkv.

Well OK, I guess what I meant was that it plays mkv,avi,mp3,mp4 etc, whereas my other TV will not play all of those formats.