external hard drive help

would depend on the HU, some (most) don't support of 32gb right now. also need to make sure the movies are in a format the HU will play, also need to make sure the file/folder structure is setup properly for the way the HU wants to see it.

Lastly, i wouldnt recommend putting a mechanical hard disk drive in your car without setting up some type of vibration/shock protection for it. you would be better off getting and SSD and formatting the movies to the smallest compressed format the HU will play.

you could just use a thumbdrive or something like that to play your music through the external usb. it's just a solution for the music, not multimedia, but i've done it before and it's really convenient.

thanks guys . the drive im looking at is a seagate goflex drive . which i dont think is mechanical . i could be wrong . but i would take measure to prevent vibration if it works .this is how would i figure out the file type . i guess for the most part it would be trile and error thing right . just dont wanna mess us anything .

i already use a thumb drive which i had from my old system. but currently looking to go more on the custom side of things for everything . this would be a great addition. i recently purchased an suv and have gutted everything but the doors which i will be replacing in the next week or two and building a new sub box to replace the old one .

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i'm pretty interested in what you're doing with the drive and everything... let me know how it all works out man

Heat inside your vehicle while it is parked might be a factor and also humidity. Look into that before you purchase. just my .02 cents

Heat inside your vehicle while it is parked might be a factor and also humidity. Look into that before you purchase. just my .02 cents

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true, gotta factor that in. make sure it's well ventilated, or can breathe somewhat

how many movies are you trying to watch that you need an external in your car? I have used mine ONE time..

sure thing . well let everyon know how it goes and steps taken. have a friend of a friend who looking into a couple different drives . hes a I.T guy. he seems to think it can be done. there are a couple different things he brought up that play a big part in if it works out.

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yeah, no doubt it can be. have an I.T guy in there would really make things a lot easier. saves you from having to try and learn a lot of info quickly

i have roughly 300 or more on a few different hard drives on my pc. but i also have about 20,000 songs maybe more from when i used to dj a few yrs ago. quit a few of the movies would be for my 10 year old. we take alot of road trips and weekend trips.
what kind do you have and how well did it work.

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I have always used just my IPOD or dvd for movies in my truck.. You can contact the manufacturer and ask if the usb will accept video and if so what to call the folder to access it. Mine also has an SD slot which I haven't tried..

you have to format the HDD to FAT32 which can be accomplished through command prompt o on some formatting software. The more you have the longer it is going to take to load.

I've actually been doing movies and music videos on my pioneer avic and i have tried sd cards, thumb drives, dvd and CD's and below are what I found and hopefully will help you out.

Pioneer avic will read without any further encoding divx movies from CD and DVD media only.

SD cards, you need to re encode the movies to fit under 1gb and to resize the video and audio bit rates, I have used up to 16gb of sd cards doing movies and music videos, problem on music video there is no shuffle function which means the way you save the files will be played as is. you can create multiple folders like genre.

USB same as sd card in re encoding. best media is a card reader with a class 10 SDHC, I have tried up to 16gb with little issue, there are times that it will stutter in the beginning, it seems like videos play better on sd card slot in the HU faster read of media.

USB thumbdrive is not that good on movies, will work for smaller files like music video up to 8gb, it started to stutter on 16gb but will still play.

in my opinion best way is to get an ipod touch and connect thru netflix and pipe your video to your head unit. or use an ipod 60gb or more for videos, doing it this way the processing is not being done by the head unit but by the media player and your head unit just act as a output device.

Hope this helps