What the heck are the USB ports on DVD players/recorders for?? (1 Viewer)

[Jesse Skeen]

What exactly can you do with those USB ports found on some DVD players? I thought you'd be able to hook up an external hard drive and play media files on it through your TV, but I just got a Polaroid DVD recorder that has one and tried it, and it didn't even recognize the drive being plugged in. The manual's not very clear as to what its real purpose is.

 

[John Garcia]

My Oppo 980 recognizes media via the USB port without issue. It pops up on the screen and asks if you want to read from the drive and you can toggle between the two with the remote. Is there a button on your remote to tell the player to access the port?

 

[Ar3d]

It is a cable that use to connect through our PC. If have a problem in using that and how it use? go to the website of the manufacturer... another one, most of the hardware right now has dics drive (installer) which used to recognized by our PC of what type of hardware that you add. So check if theres a driver or need to install the driver first.

 

[Jesse Skeen]

I tried out a card reader I got, since my PC doesn't have any card slots on it, and it let me show pictures on the TV so that's pretty cool. It still wouldn't take anything from the hard drive though.

 

[Dan Driscoll]

On some older devices the USB port is only there for service and diagnostic use, it has no consumer functionality. On others it may have been put there for future planned upgrades that may or may not have been implemented.

 

[John Garcia]

I haven't tried my 320G HD with the Oppo, but Oppo said yes an HDD would work with the port but that there was a limit to the size it would recognize. It also has to be formatted FAT32 to be recognized by the PS3, so maybe that is a factor as well?