Rear entertainment Rear USB format

Phew, alright, I have successfully been able to get the rear entertainment to recognize my USB and to play videos on it. Note, I also installed VLC Player on the rear entertainment center, which I think allows me to play any format that the VLC Player can play.

There are unfortunately some limitations that I will describe below as well.

Here's the magical formula:

• I used a 128GB USB Stick
• Must be formatted as FAT32 (I was not able to get exFAT or NTFS to work)
  • Since it's FAT32, you can only have the maximum of 4GB files
• If you use VLC Player, I don't think file types matter at all. I was able to play .MKV and .MP4 on VLC
• The USB Stick MUST be plugged into the front "Rear" USB input in the front BEFORE you start the car.

Real Bummer, but makes sense:
Here's the real bummer. ONLY the rear right TV mounted the USB and was able to play it. You cannot have both rear screens both mount the USB Drive (which makes sense actually). But it means only the Rear Right screen can use the Videos on the USB Drive. You can have the left screen "mirror" the right screen and then both can watch the same thing at the same time, but the right screen remains in control of that USB Stick.

Formatting via the FireTV:
I was also able to try and use the FireTV on the rear one to actually format the USB stick itself. I thought that this would be exactly what I wanted, but when I then took the USB stick and put it in my Linux machine to transfer files.....the format of the drive is "unknown" which means that Amazon must do some proprietary thing for its file system. So I couldn't actually transfer my movies to it on my Linux machine.

jamesd said:

Phew, alright, I have successfully been able to get the rear entertainment to recognize my USB and to play videos on it. Note, I also installed VLC Player on the rear entertainment center, which I think allows me to play any format that the VLC Player can play.

There are unfortunately some limitations that I will describe below as well.

Here's the magical formula:

• I used a 128GB USB Stick
• Must be formatted as FAT32 (I was not able to get exFAT or NTFS to work)
  • Since it's FAT32, you can only have the maximum of 4GB files
• If you use VLC Player, I don't think file types matter at all. I was able to play .MKV and .MP4 on VLC
• The USB Stick MUST be plugged into the front "Rear" USB input in the front BEFORE you start the car.

Real Bummer, but makes sense:
Here's the real bummer. ONLY the rear right TV mounted the USB and was able to play it. You cannot have both rear screens both mount the USB Drive (which makes sense actually). But it means only the Rear Right screen can use the Videos on the USB Drive. You can have the left screen "mirror" the right screen and then both can watch the same thing at the same time, but the right screen remains in control of that USB Stick.

Formatting via the FireTV:
I was also able to try and use the FireTV on the rear one to actually format the USB stick itself. I thought that this would be exactly what I wanted, but when I then took the USB stick and put it in my Linux machine to transfer files.....the format of the drive is "unknown" which means that Amazon must do some proprietary thing for its file system. So I couldn't actually transfer my movies to it on my Linux machine.

Click to expand...

As a follow up to James' post above, this was my experience:

So... after tons of trial and error here's my (Kind of) simple fix. What was getting me was that i was using a 128gb flash drive... most of them come formatted with either exFAT or NTFS file systems... and Windows will not let you format them for anything but those two either (They don't like that the files can not be bigger than 4gb). So... I used a free program (EaseUS: Format 128GB USB to FAT32 with USB Formatter and PowerShell) and used that to format the larger USB Drives (I used these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D7PDLXC?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1) to FAT32. Then I added my .mp4 files to the drives (Formatting will erase the drive so put those on another drive while you format and then move them back after).

Lastly, I inserted the drives BEFORE starting the car/system up... someone suggested this in another thread and it seemed to be an important part of the puzzle. Drives in ports 1 & 2 will work with the passenger screen and "Rear" port drive should work with the rear screens (Which you can also mirror to the front screen if you like. )

If you want to maximize space and compatibility, i would convert all movies to 720Pand .mp4 format with Handbrake (A free windows/mac download) it should be a standard preset and will save some space on the disk and keep those movies under the 4gb limit of FAT32 as well... and let you fit more movies on them. I have about 50 movies on each 128gb flash drive.

Lastly, on the rear screens i got the USB port to show up by going to the gear on those screens (Settings and selecting input->UBS->movies from there.... that seemed to do the trick WITHOUT VLC.

Now everyone can be entertained, even when we lose cell service on our long trips. hopefully everyone else have the same luck.

Also thought of getting an NVIDIA shield and setting up a local PLEX movie server in the car... that's the next project... basically my own netflix in the car that works even when internet is not available... but that's for another time.