Ok So I just got a new harddrive its a western digital 500gb external with usb and I have put a bunch of divx movies on it to play through my Philips dvp 5982_37 dvd player because it has a usb port on it. I plug it in and it works and streams movies without a problem but there are 2 things that really bug me that I want to fix. One it has a max for the names of files of 6-8 characters which is really annoying I would like to make bigger and two it doesn't list them in alphabetical order or in any order like they are when the hdd is plugged into my computer. Is there anything I can do to fix these problems? I have updated to the latest firmware but still doesn't fix..
I have the same Philips 5982 and Western Digital MyBook setup as you. It works great except for those annoying things you mentioned. I read on the AVSForum that it's simply because Philips doesn't want to pay a royalty to Microsoft for the DOS filename standard or something like that. Until they do, you'll just have to live with it or shorten filenames to under 8 characters with no spaces in between. As for sort order, it seems that the files loaded first on the hard drive appear first, and the files loaded last appear last. I just create a bunch of subdirectories to keep track of everything. Even those are sorted by when they are created on the hard drive. Keep checking any firmware updates on the Philips website to see if they add the feature.
I have a 5960. I tried plugging my external into it yesterday and got nowhere. Does the whole drive have to be formatted into FAT? I have it partitioned and part of it is still NTFS. Also, what are the file formats that are supported? Philips' website says mp3, wma, and jpeg only, but obviously if you are watching movies, they are in a different format than that, right? Is there any problem with speed? Does it seem to play as fast as a DVD does? Thank you!
