I tried unsuccessfully for several weeks to play home movies from USB on my late 2016 Bravia 55” smart (?)/Android TV. The same USB drive worked perfectly on a small Samsung in a spare bedroom. My USB devices were formatted as FAT32. Movie files were all less than 2Gb and were in formats listed by Sony as acceptable (mostly mp4).
I took my USB device to the retailer where I bought the TV (PC World, Milton Keynes, UK). They could not get my USB device to work with a single Sony TV in their store. Not one. They then tested the same USB device with Samsung and LG TVs which worked perfectly. The store’s Sony “expert” could not offer any advice other than resetting my TV to factory specs; this was meaningless as the Sony TVs in the store had the same problem. I called PC World “help” who claimed never to have heard of this problem and offered no solution or useful ideas.
I created a new 16Gb USB “stick” formatted as ExFat. That worked!!!!! I then reformated a 2Tb external drive as ExFat. That would not work. I reformated the 2Tb drive again using the reformat facility in the TV’s settings menu. The external drive was reformated as Fat32. That worked, but the maximum file size is around 2Gb, not 4Gb as shown in this video. I will next try a 1Tb external drive formatted as ExFat.
The picture and sound quality (through Sony sound bar) are superb, but the USB experience has left me seriously underwhelmed by Sony. A great deal of time-consuming messing around has been required to get my Sony to read USBs. It is pretty frustrating when other brands work immediately, and quite frankly unacceptable for a top brand like Sony.
