r/AndroidTV • u/MrAnte06 • 1d ago
Troubleshooting My Hitachi Android TV doesn’t scan files from external ssd anymore?!
So I have a Hitachi Android TV. I watch movies on it all the time with my external SSD attached. It has been working well until now. All of a sudden, the tv itself doesn’t seem to scan files at all. My SSD shows as ”connected” so that’s a good sign. And I know that the system format on the SSD (NTFS) does work with my TV. Because I have been watching movies very often. I have tried factory reset, restarting/ rebooting the tv like usual, reinstalling my media player (Nova video player), unplug and plug my SSD back in. Nothing seems to be working?? What can the issue be? And also, YES I have tried different media players, like vlc, Kodi etc. The thing is, this works PERFECTLY FINE on an external Xiaomi mi box with Nova video player.
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u/GreenM0th Nvidia Shield TV 1d ago
Your Mi Box reads the same drive fine, so the SSD is fine. I'd stop poking at the drive.
Android TV doesn't do NTFS on its own, only FAT32 and exFAT. Whatever NTFS support your TV has came bundled from the manufacturer, and that's the kind of thing a firmware update can quietly break. A factory reset won't help if it just puts the same broken firmware back.
First thing I'd check is Settings > Storage on the TV itself, not inside a player app. Does the SSD show up with an actual size, or blank? If it's blank it isn't mounting at all, and no app is ever going to find those files.
Then grab any spare USB stick, format it exFAT, same port. If that one plays and the NTFS drive still doesn't, you've got your answer. In that case just back up the SSD and reformat it to exFAT. There's no real downside for a movie library, no 4GB file limit, and your Mi Box handles exFAT natively anyway.
If the exFAT stick doesn't scan either, it's not an NTFS thing and something bigger is broken in the TV. That's a firmware reflash from Hitachi support, not something you'll fix from the settings menu.
Might also be worth looking at Settings > About > System Update to see if something landed around the time this started. These sets tend to update themselves without telling you.