loading 5Gb on 16Gb flash drive

not sure if im in the right section, but here goes. im trying to load a 5Gb movie onto a 16Gb flash drive. cant do it. it says there is 16Gb available but still cant do it. ive heard of it needing to be formatted to NTFS but that seems to be another problem. tried a free program but it says error. im using the flash drive to watch movies on my samsung hdtv which has a usb hdd port. i tried exFat and was able to load the movie onto the flash drive but then my tv wont see it. suggestions.

Moved thread to "other hardware and peripherals".

What is the current format of the flash drive? If it is formatted FAT you will never get the file on there due to the 4.3 GB limitation.

exactly, FAT. ive read about NTFS programs but i cant get the free one to work. beleive its the 3G program. any other way to format it to accept the larger size and still be able to play it on my tv ?

That entirely depends on what your TV can read and handle. Most of them usually stick with FAT32 as the partition type for USB flash drives, so you might not have much of a choice there.

Perhaps you can split the movie into 2 files that fall within the 4.3GB limit and go about it that way..

For me, I'm all about streaming the movies directly from my NAS, so the file sizes don't become an issue..

i re-formatted it on vmware fushion. i loading the movie now so ill see if my tv sees it. worse case is i can stream them with PS3 media.

^^ Exactly. I have not come across a TV yet that reads anything more than the FAT format. The split file is about the only way that you will succeed if you must use the USB stick method.

Streaming is king, but I understand that you may not have that option.

G/L

well i used vmware fushion with windows 7 home premium. re formatted to NTFS then loaded my movie on it. plugged into my tv and works perfect. what i see now is that the NTFS format seems better, allowing for a larger file, or movie in this case, to be put on it. dont know why fat restricts its size and windows doesnt. and yes i have ps3 media server to stream from my mac to my tv, though my ps3, im toldl i could stream directly from my mac to my tv but havent had any success with that yet.

hotrod351 said:

well i used vmware fushion with windows 7 home premium. re formatted to NTFS then loaded my movie on it. plugged into my tv and works perfect. what i see now is that the NTFS format seems better, allowing for a larger file, or movie in this case, to be put on it. dont know why fat restricts its size and windows doesnt. and yes i have ps3 media server to stream from my mac to my tv, though my ps3, im toldl i could stream directly from my mac to my tv but havent had any success with that yet.

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Good news, glad you got it going. I have not used a USB in a TV for a few years, so I'm glad to see that NTFS is now an option. This has always been a limitation with FAT, and many years ago who had a file that was more than 4GB?? Not many did, so it was not a big deal.

Anyway, glad you were successful.

This is the reason why exFAT is around (32 bit FAT).

i installed a program called paragon 9. now i have the NTFS option on osx. with everything osx lion has im surprised that this format option isnt offered in disk utility. seeing as i can install a program that enables it. oh well its all good now. guess when im bored ill try to find out why mac doesnt. exFAT enabled me to install the larger files but my tv didnt see it. i now figure that the flash drive was more than likely NTFS format when i bought it. when i use disk utility to erase it i reformatted it to FAT.

Windows doesn't deal with anything other than FAT16/FAT32 and NTFS, so why should Mac OS, technically, deal with partition types that it definitely use?

for me its because i cant install anything in the 4Gb plus range onto a flash drive. whats the purpose of buying a 16Gb flash drive if mac will only let me install a movie, or whatever, in the 3Gb or less range. ive seen a lot of posts about this problem. all i know is that the paragon program fixed that. mac offers boot camp for running windows, why not offer NTFS format. any way its a done deal and i now have another program to add to my many. more is better.

From an outsider perspective, as someone who doesn't use macs much, I would have expected that OSX had NTFS support built in - most their stuff is pretty easy to pick up and use, but a problem like the thread starter had is hard to figure out if you don't know that FAT doesn't support large file sizes. I wouldn't have expected Linux to include NTFS support, but then it often takes some doing to make different things work.

So anyways, I looked into it and OSX 10.6 and higher actually do include NTFS write support built in, which would be required in order to format a USB drive with NTFS (its more widely supported by accessories than OSX or linux filesystems). However the NTFS write support is disabled in OSX and has been reported to cause some stability issues like kernel panics when enabled. (Ref: NTFS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

That said, I wanted to mention NTFS-3G. It works on OS X, and I've used it extensively on Linux - it brings NTFS without any bugs or BS, and just works really well. Most importantly its free... Paragon sells something similar for $20. Hopefully this can save someone a few bucks.

some one who understands what im saying. i tried NTFS-3G dont know what im doing wrong but kept getting error message when trying to format the flash drive. i installed the download twice. of-course now that i have paragon installed i could install NTFS-3G and it would work.