problem using flash drive jpegs from a Mac on an HDTV

Equipment:
Computer: Mac G4 (powerpc) OS X 10.4.11
Flash drive: SanDisk cruzer USB 4GB, formated as FAT32
HDTV: Panasonic TC-P50GT50
Blu-ray player: Oppo BDP-103

I am using a USB flash drive to view JPEG photos on my HDTV, using the USB port on the HDTV or the Blu-ray player, both of which have a Media Player to support this. I am able to view the photos just fine but there is a problem with the thumbnail view of the photos on both devices. When Media Player displays the thumbnail images, I see the photos but also see "blank" thumbnail images which are displayed ahead of the photo thumbnails. The Panasonic displays these "blank" thumbnails as an icon that looks like a small rectangle with an exclamation point (!); the Oppo just displays a gray rectangle. When I display the "info" for one of these, I find that it has a filename similar to one of my photos but prefixed with "._", so for example if the photo was "IMG_4659.jpg" the corresponding "blank" file has the name "._IMG_4659.jpg". The .jpg files were copied to the flash drive from my Mac. These "blank" files do not appear when I display the flash drive contents on my Mac, even when I force it to display "invisible" files. I know some Mac files include a "resource fork" which sometimes is viewed by non-Mac systems as a separate file. I attempted to delete the resource forks (using File Buddy 8.1) prior to copying the files to the flash drive, but that apparently didn't help (I'm pretty sure the fork removal worked because the file sizes were about 56KB smaller afterwards, but after copying the files to the flash drive they grew by about 8-12KB). So I'm hoping somebody out there has also tried displaying Mac-based photos on an HDTV via a flash drive.

There are many ways to sort this out, scripts, command line tweaking etc.

This app is quite handy for the purpose though:
Remove, Delete .DS_Store Files In USB Flash Drives Automatically In Mac OS X

or try Asepsis (sorry this is for Lion and above)
http://asepsis.binaryage.com/#installation

problem solved

Thank you, mrplow, for suggesting the "AppleOff" app, even though it appears that it is no longer available at the download site or anywhere else for that matter. However, in the process of researching AppleOff, I ran across a product review ( AppleOff 1.2 | The Very Ugly ) that explains the Unix commands which can be entered in Terminal to accomplish the same thing. Below I offer an example of how I implemented this (some of my naming conventions have been altered to avoid confusion). Basically I just drilled down to the folder containing the photos and used a "sudo find" command which searches for the unwanted files (the ones prefixed by "._") and invokes an "rm" command to remove each file matching the condition of the find. I also did the same thing to eliminate the ".DS_Store" file, though that was not really part of my original problem. With the "._*" files out of the way, my navigation though photos with Media Player on my Blu-ray and HDTV is greatly simplified.

Last login: Sun Feb 24 16:22:33 on ttyp1
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computer1:~ user1$ cd /Volumes/Flashdrive/
computer1:/Volumes/Flashdrive user1$ ls
BSG photos video_tests
computer1:/Volumes/Flashdrive user1$ cd photos
computer1:/Volumes/Flashdrive/photos user1$ ls -a
. ._IMG_2917.jpg ._IMG_2984.jpg IMG_2908.jpg IMG_2968.jpg
.. ._IMG_2925.jpg ._IMG_2988.jpg IMG_2917.jpg IMG_2984.jpg
.DS_Store ._IMG_2950.jpg ._IMG_2992.jpg IMG_2925.jpg IMG_2988.jpg
._IMG_2900.jpg ._IMG_2955.jpg ._IMG_2995.jpg IMG_2950.jpg IMG_2992.jpg
._IMG_2908.jpg ._IMG_2968.jpg IMG_2900.jpg IMG_2955.jpg IMG_2995.jpg
computer1:/Volumes/Flashdrive/photos user1$ sudo find . -name \._\* -exec rm -f {} \;
Password:
computer1:/Volumes/Flashdrive/photos user1$ ls -a
. .DS_Store IMG_2908.jpg IMG_2925.jpg IMG_2955.jpg IMG_2984.jpg IMG_2992.jpg
.. IMG_2900.jpg IMG_2917.jpg IMG_2950.jpg IMG_2968.jpg IMG_2988.jpg IMG_2995.jpg
computer1:/Volumes/Flashdrive/photos user1$ sudo find . -name \.DS_Store -exec rm -f {} \;
computer1:/Volumes/Flashdrive/photos user1$ ls -a
. IMG_2900.jpg IMG_2917.jpg IMG_2950.jpg IMG_2968.jpg IMG_2988.jpg IMG_2995.jpg
.. IMG_2908.jpg IMG_2925.jpg IMG_2955.jpg IMG_2984.jpg IMG_2992.jpg
computer1:/Volumes/Flashdrive/photos user1$