External Hard Drive not seen by home theater?
 

I'm quite the newbie when it comes to storing video files on a USB drive, so maybe someone can give me some guidance. I purchased a WD Elements 1.5TB drive and stored some MPEG-2 and .TS files on it. Tested it by plugging into my LG home theater system's receiver, and then straight into the television itself. Both ways, all files played just fine. Decided this was the answer to my storage dreams, and ordered another Elements drive (2TB) and a Seagate 5TB drive. Tested both of those by dropping just a few MPEG-2 files on them, and was surprised to find that I could not get my TV (or receiver) to recognize them. The system does recognize that a USB drive is connected, it just doesn't recognize that any files are stored on it. I hook the same drives up to my laptop or my desktop, and the files are recognized with no problem. What surprises me is that the TV sees the files on the 1.5TB Elements just fine, but won't recognize the exact same files on the 2TB Elements. The drives are all formatted NTFS. Can anyone tell me where I'm going wrong?

I don't know the specifics of the home theatre hardware, but there are two likely factors at play here:
- formatting
- size

Hard drives have physical differences beyond 2tb, and again past 4/5/6tb (varies by manufacturer). Computers have to interact with these differences -- by way of drivers, and other hardware tricks within an enclosure (if external).

The other issue is formatting: NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, HFS+, Ext4 -- etc, etc, and many more. The drive likely came formatted as exFAT or NTFS, and you need to reformat it for the other one. HFS+ is just for Macs, and a "Mac" version drives are preformatted for it (but can be reformatted with zero issues for any other OS or file system). See what the "working" drive is formatted as.

Your job is now to look in the home theatre instruction manuals, and find what is allowed and/or required.

You seem to know some of this, but something is still amiss.

There is also a slight chance that the MPEG files need a specific flag/marker on them, to notify the setup that it's one of it's own files. Again, I'm not sure what sort of home theatre hardware this is. It's not likely, but certainly not impossible. MPEG is a wide spec, especially for transport streams (TS).

Both the working WD Elements drive and the one whose files will not display are formatted NTFS. Near as I can telk, everything about them is identical EXCEPT that one has a capacity of 1.5TB and the other has 2TB. I've read the specs on my LG home theater system, and they indicate it supports play for both MPEG2 and .TS files. But it seems the system IS the problem, as I plugged the 2TB drive directly into my TV, and it reads the files with no problem. In the short run, I think I'll just buy several Elements 1.5TB drives, and see how long it takes me to max them out. I can hook 4 of them to my receiver, so it should take me a while to use up 6TB of storage space.