Watch movies from my harddrive on my tv?

[Lachlan2104]

Hey everyone
I know this is probably a stupid question..
I would like to watch movie from my hard drive on my TV, I am currently doing this by connecting a HDMI cable to a laptop under the TV and plugging the hard drive into it.

This seems to be a bit of a hassle and I think there must be a nicer way to do this...
I would also like the option to have the ability to have DVD cover images and possibly descriptions.
The ability to search would be nice and sorting via genre...

Yeah so sorry to confuse you but how would you go about this..

 

[Conroy1988]

We used to have a dvd multimedia player in our living room that had the ability for a hard drive to be plugged in and movies ran off that, it had .sub support aswell for subtitles, along with most common video file types, maybe that's an option for you

 

[Lachlan2104]

We used to have a dvd multimedia player in our living room that had the ability for a hard drive to be plugged in and movies ran off that, it had .sub support aswell for subtitles, along with most common video file types, maybe that's an option for you

Can you search the files on it and or give them cover photos?
And where would I get one? Particular model?

 

[Lachlan2104]

We used to have a dvd multimedia player in our living room that had the ability for a hard drive to be plugged in and movies ran off that, it had .sub support aswell for subtitles, along with most common video file types, maybe that's an option for you

Can you search the files on it and or give them cover photos?
And where would I get one? Particular model?

 

[Conroy1988]

If there was a picture in the folder named the same as the video file, much like a sub file, then it would just auto use that picture when it was browsed via the player, the one we had was a sony, it died about 3 years after pretty heavy use, honestly can't mind what model it was, if I stumble across the manual when moving stuff later I'll put it here

I know there's a lot out there though, finding a specific for the pictures might be a problem, but we got ours from play.com back when it wasn't being strangled by whoever seems to have taken it iver, hope this helps some degree

Edit: and yea files could be searched by using the remote and typing in what we wanted, was much like a media browser really

 

[Lachlan2104]

If there was a picture in the folder named the same as the video file, much like a sub file, then it would just auto use that picture when it was browsed via the player, the one we had was a sony, it died about 3 years after pretty heavy use, honestly can't mind what model it was, if I stumble across the manual when moving stuff later I'll put it here

I know there's a lot out there though, finding a specific for the pictures might be a problem, but we got ours from play.com back when it wasn't being strangled by whoever seems to have taken it iver, hope this helps some degree

Edit: and yea files could be searched by using the remote and typing in what we wanted, was much like a media browser really

Sounds good. I think I used to have something similar but it was slow? Did you have anything like this problem? Thanks for the help mate its appreciated

 

[Conroy1988]

I'll be honest they're all somewhat slow compared to a proper like blueray, or an xbox for example but they've cane a fair way now, even the cheapest 15 quid dvd basic players are surprisingly fast nowadays, I tend to stick with either sony Phillips or Samsung products as they seem to be pretty spot on with speed chap

 

[Wolfshadw]

YAMMM

If you're running Windows 7 Media Center on your laptop, this will give you what you're looking for.

-Wolf sends