Is there any way to hook up my tv to an external hard drive and watch movies from the external hard drive?
Yeah you could use something like this: But whatever hard drive you use needs to be formatted in FAT32
i use an external usb hard drive through my dvd player to my tv.the instuction book for my dvd player clearly said not to and it has crashed a couple of times after watching a movie.
If you have a smart TV (your TV has a USB port) then you would just hook up your hardrive to play AVi, MP4, WMV, etc. Judging from your question you probably don't have a USB port so you would need to purchase an "external Harddrive media player". Western Digital and Iomega have media players that play every codec out there and if you back up your DVDs they will play VOB/ISO files with the DVD menus. I have a Western Digital Media Player I purchased from Best Buy for $99.99 and it also connects to the internet for netflix and other apps. The price is steep but it's 1080P compatible for my TV.