Connecting USB harddrive to Philips DVP-5990/37 player

[DVantrease]

Hi, just got a Philips DVP-5990/37 DVD player, installed the custom firmware. I see some people are connecting external USB harddrives to the player. Can I connect *ANY* USB harddrive? Or just certain ones?

[jman98]

If the USB harddrive is FAT32 formatted then it will work. NTFS will NOT work. However, nobody can guarantee that for some crazy 1 in a million reason, probably due to manufacturing defects, that you won't have some drive that just won't work even though it should. But the odds are highly in your favor that if your drive is FAT32 formatted that it will work.

[redwudz]

It needs to be formatted as FAT32, but many are. You might read this review of the 5990 by bwd777 as it has a fair amount of info on setting up a drive for the 5990: http://www.videohelp.com/dvdplayers?...y=Name&hits=50

I also found a handy tool to format drives to FAT32 or FAT16, if you need to, called Swissknife: http://www.compuapps.com/download/Sw...swissknife.htm It seems to get around the Windows limitation of 32GB partition sizes for FAT32 formatted drives and is easy and quick to use.

[craigf]

Will this player accept drives formatted with the new exFAT? Has anyone tried it?

[Supreme2k]

No and yes.

[shadow_cruiser]

Will this player accept drives formatted with the new exFAT? Has anyone tried it?

It actually reads the exFAT file system but doesn't show any files. Where as, the 5982 wouldn't even recognize the exFAT file system. A message would come up saying "Device not supported".

This leads me to believe the 5990 will support the exFAT file system with a firmware update. I think its not supported now because its still in baby stage (released with Vista SP1) but give it another 6 months and it should be adopted.

[redwudz]

ExFAT (FAT64) was released for Vista SP1 and I don't know how likely it will be ported to other systems. It does get around the 32GB partition size problem and the 4GB file size problem of FAT32 using Windows formating, and it's supposed to have much faster access to larger partitions than FAT32.

It may perform better than NTFS. It sounds good on paper, but I don't know if anyone else will adopt it and if MS will let them; That's one big question. I have seen where the drivers have been ported to XP, but any formating of ExFat devices would still have to be done on a Vista SP1 machine.

A Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exfat

[El Heggunte]

ExFAT (FAT64) was released for Vista SP1 and I don't know how likely it will be ported to other systems. It does get around the 32GB partition size problem and the 4GB file size problem of FAT32 using Windows formating, and it's supposed to have much faster access to larger partitions than FAT32.

It may perform better than NTFS. It sounds good on paper, but I don't know if anyone else will adopt it and if MS will let them; That's one big question. I have seen where the drivers have been ported to XP, but any formating of ExFat devices would still have to be done on a Vista SP1 machine.

A Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exfat

Since January of this year, exFAT is available to Windows XP as well:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

[edDV]

...

I also found a handy tool to format drives to FAT32 or FAT16, if you need to, called Swissknife: http://www.compuapps.com/download/Sw...swissknife.htm It seems to get around the Windows limitation of 32GB partition sizes for FAT32 formatted drives and is easy and quick to use.

A side benefit of FAT32 formatting is compatibility with MAC OSX and Linux as well (record and play).

[cal_tony]

I downloaded the EXFat software from Microsoft as indicated above and was able to format one of my USB drives with an XP computer to the EXFat file system.

As also indicated above, the drive was recognized but the indication given was that it had an "Empty Card"

I tried this on 2 players. One with the VROD firmware and one with the Stock firmware. Both gave the same indication.

Next will be to see if Swiss Knife will be able to convert the EXFat drive back to Fat 32.

Tony

[edDV]

I downloaded the EXFat software from Microsoft as indicated above and was able to format one of my USB drives with an XP computer to the EXFat file system.

As also indicated above, the drive was recognized but the indication given was that it had an "Empty Card"

I tried this on 2 players. One with the VROD firmware and one with the Stock firmware. Both gave the same indication.

Next will be to see if Swiss Knife will be able to convert the EXFat drive back to Fat 32.

Tony

I tried EXFat on my Philips 5992 and it didn't work.

ExFat is intended as a future flash card format but few devices support it now.

[El Heggunte]

edDV wrote:

ExFat is intended as a future flash card format but few devices support it now.

I only know that I've just re-formatted the 1st partition of my 2ndary HDD with exFAT,
and it's working very fine --- without the 4GB filesize limitation of FAT32,
and without the huge overhead of NTFS.

Evidently, the idea should have been implemented in 1996,
but, as we all know, Microsoft doesn't like to be «future-proof».

[cal_tony]

Maybe I just don't understand the above comment. If a USB drive is formatted with both EXFat and Fat 32 both formats will work in a DVP5990. Is that what's being said?

Tony