Connecting Seagate Wireless Plus to TV

[Ekirei]

Hey all,

Ive been trying to get my Seagate Wireless Plus to play on my TV via the USB cable. (I know the main selling point of the drive is its wireless capabilities, but i wanted it to also work via the USB cable - for non-smart TVs etc).

The TV is an LG one (LG 42LV450U), and has worked fine with flash drives and other external hdds ive tried. I have a 'Western Digital My Passport' formatted to NTFS which works fine via the USB connection on the TV.

I cant seem to get the Wireless Plus working at all. Its also formatted with NTFS, but when i connect it, the TV fails to read it.

I dont see why there should be this problem...perhaps the drive's wireless capabilities somehow makes it incompatable when using the USB connection? It connects perfectly well to the PC, just when it comes to the TV theres no joy.


Does anyone have any advice or insight?

Thanks in advance

Alex

 

[boosted1g]

To connect a usb device to something else the "something else" has to have drivers to support it.
If your TV does not have the drivers to support the device it wont work.

It seems that the Seagate drive does not just use a standard usb disk drive driver.

 

[Ekirei]

To connect a usb device to something else the "something else" has to have drivers to support it.
If your TV does not have the drivers to support the device it wont work.

It seems that the Seagate drive does not just use a standard usb disk drive driver.

Yep you are probably right, that this hdd requires some particular driver that makes it incompatible. It’s a shame if this is the case, because whilst new wireless technologies are good, it would be savvy to ensure that old technologies still worked with maximal compatibility. A sort of backwards compatibility philosophy.

It also would be nice to have a TV that you could manually add specific drivers to, to aid product compatibility.

I’ve sent a support email to Seagate to ask their input/advice, so we will see if they have any extra details.

thanks

 

[boosted1g]

No desire out of the TV/media companies to make it widely compatible. Why do you think most TVs only support a very limited amount of picture/movie extensions. Because they want to try to push you to buy your media content from sources where they get a cut. Last thing they want is for you to just be able to plug in an external hard drive and be able to play any type of movie/music you have.

Same reason why cellular carriers had the FM chip disabled on your phone, why would they want you to just be able to listen to radio when they could get you to use data to stream music.

 

[Ekirei]

No desire out of the TV/media companies to make it widely compatible. Why do you think most TVs only support a very limited amount of picture/movie extensions. Because they want to try to push you to buy your media content from sources where they get a cut. Last thing they want is for you to just be able to plug in an external hard drive and be able to play any type of movie/music you have.

Same reason why cellular carriers had the FM chip disabled on your phone, why would they want you to just be able to listen to radio when they could get you to use data to stream music.

I don’t doubt or challenge this lack of vendor motivation to implement such a system, just pointing out that it would be nice from a user perspective.

This sort of proprietary 'lock in' is such a shame; forcing vendor dependencies, reducing cross compatibility and interoperability, ultimately manipulating the market towards states of monopoly. Ultimately the whole enterprise suffers from barriers to market entry, avoidance of healthy competition and free consumer choice. All because of greed; the system is skewed to favour these vendors at the expense of the customers.

A new paradigm shift in open standardisation and regulation would be greatly welcomed in my opinion.

 

[phocks]

Hello I thought I would just give you my solution to see if it worked for you. I just bought a Seagate Wireless USB drive (not the 'plus' version). And I noticed that it was not picking up the drive when I connected it to the TV. It was NTFS formatted and 500GB just like another drive that I had, which did work.

Anyway, I got it working by deleting the partition in Windows Disk Management and then right-clicking the disk and converting it from a GPT disk to an MBR disk and then recreating the partition and reformatting it as NTFS with the default settings. I then plugged it into the TV and the television recognised the drive.

So it looks like some TVs do not pick up the newer GUID Partition Table disks and only work with the Master Boot Record formatted disks. I hope this works in your case as well, or helps someone else. And it looks like I won't have to return it to the shop after all!