DVD player that can read external HDD via USB

[Taz]

Originally Posted by couchpants

hey guys, im so glad ive found someone trying to do the same thing i am.
Maybe you could help me get this working? I would appreciate it so much.

Ive had a Seagate FreeAgent 500GB usb hdd for a while now, and i recently bought a Samsung DVD-P380 for the sole purpose of playing videos off of my hard drive. I tested it with a 1GB flash drive, worked fine, and tried playing avi off of a dvd and works great. But it does not recognize my Seagate at all. Ive tried calling Samsung, they were no help at all, they basically read back the manual to me, quoting the two specific models of hdds that they say works with this model of dvd player. I also emailed them, wondering if there was a firmware upgrade that may help, but again was told, "the UDB host is designed for accepting small type of plug & play media devices that requires not drivers to communicate. Your seagate is probably too big and we do not have any such driver to provide" thats an exact quote...
So my question, is there anyway of telling which hdds will work with what dvd players? or is there anything else i can try to make this one work?

thankyou so much for reading...

I had to experiment to get my Philips DVD player to recognise my external HDD. In the end, I found that I had to keep the HDD powered off whilst the DVD player powered up. It then displayed a 'no disc' message (which was correct). At that point I powered up the external HDD and the DVD player found it after about 10 seconds. This was the only way that I could reliably get it to read the external HDD every time. Perhaps you could try this out too on your DVD player?