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Can I connect an external Hard Disk Drive (HDD) to my Philips TV?

You can connect your TV to an external HDD in two ways.

Connecting an external HDD as a Mass Storage Class device:

With this connection, the HDD can be used only as a storage device. The connection needs to comply with the following requirements:

  • The HDD must be formatted in FAT32 or NTFS
  • The HDD needs to have its own power supply, because the TV does not provide one
  • The HDD needs to be connected to a USB input

Over this type of connection the TV will only be able to reproduce those files that are stored in a format that is supported by the TV (Please refer to the user manual to see which file types your TV supports).

You can check how the HDD is formatted as follows:

  1. Connect the HDD to a USB port on your computer.
  2. Wait until your computer has finished detecting and installing the external device (you will see a pop-up screen that indicates that the 'new hardware is ready to be used').
  3. Double-click on the 'My Computer' icon on your desktop (or select 'My Computer' from the start menu).
  4. In the 'My Computer' screen you will see an icon that represents the external HDD.
  5. Right click on this icon and select (click) Properties.
  6. You will now see a screen that displays important data about your HDD, including the type of 'File system'.

If your HDD has multimedia capabilities, you can connect it as a standard peripheral device.

In this case you need to connect the device to one of the TV´s audio or video inputs (for video files, we recommend an HDMI-to-HDMI connection).

The internal multimedia player of the HDD will reproduce the files. You will therefore be able to playback any file that is supported by the Codecs which are installed on the HDD.

Most external hard disc drives allow you to install additional Codecs by connecting them to a computer.

Please refer to the documentation of your HDD for instructions.

The information on this page applies to the following models: 42PFL6805H/12, 52PFL8605H/12, 46PFL9705H/12. Click here to show more product numbers  ›

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