How do watch movies from my hard drive on my tv?

Goose

You need to convert the VOB files to MP4s which should be compatible with almost all SmartTVs.

Nick

Another option you can look at is a Roku or Google's Chromecast. I've been fairly happy with my Roku as I can play movies on my TV with it from my laptop. You'll need to download Plex software, which is free, to broadcast from your PC to the television but it's an easy setup and works great!

James S

There is several ways now. If its a smart TV and the USB port on the TV can power a pocket HDD which is a laptop hard drive it will play most formats. If you have a powered external drive that would work too as long as it has a USB plug on it. USB flash drives also work. Now if you have a basic tv that is 5 years old or older and its not a smart TV and only has HDMI input or VGA you can use a computer connected to it to play your movies and music and everything else. Your TV will function like a regular monitor. If you do not want to use a computer on it because its a huge power draw. You can buy an Android TV boxes for $70 for a good one. They have 2 to 3 USB ports and you can use your TV like a huge tablet with a keyboard and mouse and it uses very little power. All of them I seen have HDMI ports. The app you want to use on that is called VLC which is in playstore. I currently have this setup. I can watch my videos from Network shares anywhere in my home without dragging the HDD's around. I think some Smart Tv's can browse network shares but its recommended to use Ethernet wire connection not WIFI if doing this. Or look for a blu-ray player that can read from USB drives and play MPG, MP4, MKV, AVI, DiVX, MPEG, Xvid. Even better if it has DLNA Ethernet connection on the player.

Jamin

My cheap $40 DVD player has a USB port that can be used to play videos from a standard storage device like a flash drive or an external drive.

keerok

I rather copy the movie to a USB flash drive and use that with the TV. By connecting the external hard disk straight to the TV, you're shortening the life of the hard disk.

New World Man

I do it with an external HD, plugged in to a smart TV USB port, but not VOB files (those are actual DVD files) I transcode them in to high quality .mp4 files (on my TVs media player .mkv will work too) .mp4 is the same type youtube uses, but the settings I use is much better quality than that on both video and audio. The only thing I know of to universally watch is use NTFS formatted HD (FAT32 works, but file size is limitted to 2GB if you do) and not sure if it's true on alll, but my TV dosen't say it can't be done, but dose not recommend a HD larger than 2TB.

Jeffery H K

Does the computer play on it's own screen fine? If it does not, it's not gonna get any better on another tv. Then get a wireless display adapter. Mine is a USB thumb drive size that sends to a small box connected to tv. Mine has VGA and HDMI to connect to different tv.

Master Of Puppets

I built an HTPC, which is a Home Theater PC. It basically is a standard PC. I installed the front-end called Kodi which allows me to playback movies, TV shows, etc that I have saved on my HTPC's hard drive. I mostly rip my own DVD and Blu-Ray collection and they play just fine on my HTPC. There really isn't any stuttering or lag of any kind.