Watching Media from USB on LG Smart Tv

 Since LG has done such an abysmal job of providing any meaningful information on the topic of watching videos from a thumb drive via an LG Smart TV... I guess I will do the work for them.

 

The USB drive evidently has to be formatted as Fat32 (exFat, even though the new "universal standard," will not work).

The TV can read most typical video formats, including to my surprise, MKV.

After searching and searching for any meaningful information on how to get things working (file formats, file structure, etc.), I finally just started poking around in the TV settings to see what I could find.  Eventually I found a way to format my USB drive with the television, so that at least showed me what format the TV preferred (Fat32).  Formatting via the TV named the USB drive "no name" and created a folder called "LG Smart TV."  In that folder is a subfolder named "TN," and inside that folder is a file called "INFO."

The INFO file contains this data:

{"INFO":"{ \"core_os_release\": \"3.8.0-61408\", \"returnValue\": true }{ \"device_name\": \"m2r\", \"returnValue\": true }"}

After formatting the USB drive with the television, I popped it back into my computer and loaded it with some videos I had created via Handbrake.  However, since the drive is now formatted as Fat32 with a 4GB file size limit, none of my MKV's ripped from my DVD/BluRay collection can be placed on the drive (those files are larger than 4GB).

There is some information on the LG website that indicates you can also use the NTFS format, which would allow larger file sizes, so I reformatted the USB drive to NTFS using my computer, and sure enough, NTFS works as well.  Therefore, I can now watch the larger MKV files via USB on the LG TV.  Huzzah!

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