Movies playing on a USB stick

(02-11-2011 09:42am)dandavis1 Wrote:  Even though the satnav works off a hard disk drive...

That one though is properly mounted and insulated against shocks one would hope.

(02-11-2011 08:51am)DaveR Wrote:  I think the manual states only FAT or FAT32 formated drives are supported.

It also says:
Land Rover does not recommend the
use of a Hard Disc Drive via the USB link
while the vehicle is in motion. These
devices are not designed for in car use
and may be damaged.

So presumably a correctly formatted HD should work at the risk of the disk suffering from the vibration and shocks experienced during vehicle movement although a good external Solid State Drive (SSD) would be the answer to this if it would work ok.

Or a Kingston 128GB USB stick

(02-11-2011 08:51am)DaveR Wrote:  I think the manual states only FAT or FAT32 formated drives are supported.

It also says:
Land Rover does not recommend the
use of a Hard Disc Drive via the USB link
while the vehicle is in motion. These
devices are not designed for in car use
and may be damaged.

I'm an IT guy and can tell you that the reason for the disclaimer for the drive being damaged has nothing to do with connectivity. It would be simply an issue of the drive taking jarring vibrations while in use from driving. This could cause physical damage to a spinning disk. However, any of the pocket hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba or Iomega, that is listed as a "travel drive" usually has enough dampening to protect it from physical damage. Also, if you find a hard drive with a large enough read cache, something like 16mb or 32mb, it should be more than enough, since most MP3's would be less than 8mb, that would mean that the drive would read the entire song into memory and let the drive stop spinning, thus reducing the chances of damage.

Another thing to consider is, if you're looking for a large amount of storage, you could always go with a small external SSD (solid state drive). They are more money than the spinning discs, but they offer no moving parts, lower power consumption and faster drive access.

Because I don't want to put a lot of wear on the actual USB port in the car, the idea of keeping a hard drive is good for me. I can disconnect the cable from the drive and leave the cable in the car always plugged in, or I can put in a small USB extension cable (3") and just connect everything to that. In my case, I'm putting in a USB reader for a microsd card, and have a 32gb card that I will keep in it. When it comes time to update what's on the card, I can just pop the card out, without having to remove the thumb drive from the USB slot.

As far as the hard drive not being recognized, the reason why is one of 2 things:

1. The drive was formatted NTFS, which is the default format type for Windows 7 when formatting external drives
2. The drive is an older 2.5" drive, which required 2 USB cables for power, and the drive might have had enough power to power the drives controller card, but not initialize the physical disk.

Also, when talking about video file formats, while the unit can play MP4 and Divx, you may have difficulty if the file container is not compatible. An easy way to test is to change the name of an MP4 file to .AVI It won't cause any issues, but will rule out whether or not its just a naming convention issue that the unit won't recognize files with certain extensions.

Did a little test today and most of my movies work.

Any ideas whether music can be copied from a memory stick to the car?

Ok, here are my findings:

Even though LR have made the evoque very iPod friendly (down to an 'iPod' input) it is certainly not movie friendly!

It won't play any movie I can easily encode (like with Handbrake) but there is a way. In Finder on my Mac I can click on the file and select 'Make movie more compatible' and the computer will chug away for an hour and creat another file. This can then be encoded to DIVX after another hour of chugging. What a pain!

But the I realised - what's the point?! The ignition switches off after 10 mins so I'll never be able to relax in my car watching a movie anyway.

(11-11-2011 10:20am)dandavis1 Wrote:  Ok, here are my findings:

Even though LR have made the evoque very iPod friendly (down to an 'iPod' input) it is certainly not movie friendly!

It won't play any movie I can easily encode (like with Handbrake) but there is a way. In Finder on my Mac I can click on the file and select 'Make movie more compatible' and the computer will chug away for an hour and creat another file. This can then be encoded to DIVX after another hour of chugging. What a pain!

But the I realised - what's the point?! The ignition switches off after 10 mins so I'll never be able to relax in my car watching a movie anyway.

just use the original DVD

(11-11-2011 10:21am)mk82 Wrote:  just use the original DVD

Or buy a program that encodes more effciently - there are lots out there (Google is your friend!).

(11-11-2011 11:26am)SW6RR Wrote:  Or buy a program that encodes more effciently - there are lots out there (Google is your friend!).

Not for a Mac (believe it or not, I've heard of Google before and have already searched for suitable programs of which there are none).

Using the original DVD is a nice idea, but a 32GB USB stick could hold a LOT of DVDs which would be preferable to having a stack of DVDs rattling around in the car.

And none of this solves the fact the film will stop every 10mins anyway.

Dan, I use a Mac and found a decoding program pretty quickly. Can't recall the name but will post over the weekend if I remember.

Should have gone for the automatic it doesnt have stop start technology. Then you wont have to worry about the DVD stopping every 10minutes