NTFS Kodi, VLC, File Explorer, etc Not Reading?

by punjabi4life_aj

I recently got myself a Hisense Android TV 50H8F. The TV is nice and simple and gets all my Android TV needs in order. When I plug my 4TB NTFS Drive in it reads it and shows me the Contents through Hisenses own Media viewer App. That is okay, as I can view my video content. Yet their App is very minimal and just gets the job done.

When trying to view the content in Kodi or VLC or even a File Explorer it doesn't show anything. Kodi gives an error of Path not found. Yet these apps see the drive but have no access to the contents.

Running Android Oreo 8.0 with Feb, 2019 Security Patch

NedSc

Settings -> Apps -> Kodi -> Permissions

haojiezhu

It's probably another case of app (Hisenses media viewer in this case) using its own USB communication protocol and OS's native device driver doesn't support your harddrive for some reason. X-plore's dev has some good explanations on this type of situation:

http://www.lonelycatgames.com/wiki/xplore/usb_otg

Since you use NTFS, X-plore's custom USB driver won't be useful because it only supports FAT32. But you can try MiXplorer ( https://labs.xda-developers.com/store/app/com.mixplorer ) as its custom driver supports reading from NTFS.

Custom USB OTG driver. FAT32 (R/W), exFat(R/W), NTFS (R).

Just check "Enable OTG (Experimental)" under "Settings -> More Settings" and restart MiXplorer and confirm when prompted whether you want to mount the harddrive with custom driver. Let us know if this helps.

For NTFS drive, there's also the MBR vs. GPT issue. MBR is older with limitations but usually has better compatibility with media boxes. So if your drive is using GPT, try MBR. You'll have to backup all data on the drive before starting GPT->MBR conversion with "Disk Management" tool on Windows.

https://www.howtogeek.com/193669/whats-the-difference-between-gpt-and-mbr-when-partitioning-a-drive/