External Media Player for Mac

Hi everyone.

I got a MacBook Pro for Christmas and am still trying to figure a few things out so I am just looking for some advice about something.

I have an external hard drive that I can plug into my tv and watch movies from. So I used to use this a lot with my old pc as an external hard drive and plugged into my ya to watch all my movie/tv shows. Most of the files are Avi files.

So I realised that the hard drive is only formatted to windows so did a bit of research online and reformatted to fat32 (I think). But now I cannot use it as a media player just as a hard drive.

Basically I am wondering if there is a hard drive / media player that I can buy that is specifically for mac? And use it the exact same way I used to use my current one with my pc. Adding new files and watching on tv, simple. I would prefer to buy a new hard drive than have to do some more reformatting and things like that as I amnt the most techie person.

Any help or advice would be great.

Thanks

I'm guessing that the TV can only read certain filesystems (evidently not FAT32 which is surprising). What model TV is this?

If it indeed can only read NTFS, you can install some software to let OS X write to it. Before that though, let's make sure that's the issue.

The tv Is An LG tv.

I read in a different forum that when the hard drive was reformatted to use on my mac it took away the feature of using it on the tv and can now only be used as an external hard drive.

I'm just wondering is there any straight forward way to use this hard drive like I used to or if I can buy a new one that will do the same.

Yes, you probably can use it again but you'll need to reformat it to the original filesystem. What model of LG TV is this? Or, if you can, check the guide that came with it and see if there are details in there.

The tv is an LG model 47LV4400.

If it is the tv I won't be buying a new tv to make this work anyway so any other suggestions would be great.

I'd backup the content on the drive, format it as NTFS on your Windows machine and try plugging it in again. If it's recognized, you'll know that it's a filesystem issue.

So i changed into back into NTFS format and it now works as a harddrive with my windows laptop but still not as a media player. I must of messed it up when i changed it to MAC format.

Any suggestions of what to do next?

Or can anyone suggest a hard drive/media player made for the MAC as i wont be going back to windows any time soon!