[spellweaver01]

New to forums so please excuse etiquette.
I'm trying to do something and XBMC have got me half way there, can anyone help me with the other half. I want to create a media centre to play on my home TV, I want to be able to play MP4 format from an external hard drive (3TB HDD) without it having to be connected to my pc or internet, at the moment I can play them as MP4's but thought it'd be nice to have a menu so I can scroll down and choose a movie or series. I've tried IndigoRose and they cannot help me, theirs only run from pc.
Reason for this is we have a BluRay player and about 8,000 DVD's (original) and 40 Bluray films, not worried about converting bluray discs (my pc won't see them), but to save space I want to convert a load of DVD's and put them all on one storage device and watch what we want when we want, without having to use internet or wi-fi or Ethernet cable, just a usb cable from external hdd to TV.
Can anyone help me with this problem? all help very much appreciated.

Thank you
Mike Carbery

[DaVu]

If I understand correctly, most smart tvs can do that by default. Play mkv files from external drives.

If you want a menu to scroll, then I suppose you have to create an app for the tv. Not sure if anyone in here can do that. Its not the lack of development power, but maybe the lack of accessing the root of a smart tv and implement the code.

[spellweaver01]

I have a smart TV, Panasonic, and it offers a very basic menu, basically what you type in, but only shows 7 Characters of title so if it has a long title or series 2 or 10, I don't have room for rest of title. I was hoping for something along the lines of Windows Media Centre, where you can see a picture of the movie or episode. Here's the cruncher for it, I was hoping there might be some software out there as I no programming experience at all, other than BASIC on BBC & Acorn Electron.some 36 years ago.
MKV files are I think BLURAY files, as I said I'm not worried about these as we have a bluray player, but with so many DVD's it would be nice to store wholes series and movies on an external hard drive and view them from a menu on my TV, rather than just see part of the title and hope it's the right one.
I had looked at the possiblity that Microsoft Excel might do it, hyperlink to picture then another hyperlink to movie, but sadly that don't work on TV only on PC.

[karandras24]

you need a pc, set top box, etc to install kodi on (and store your media) and connect that to your tv via HDMI to get the nice menu, artwork etc.

IMHO, using a TV as anything other than a dumb screen with speakers attached is a bad idea and will cause you far more headaches than it's worth.

[Piers]

An Android stick or RPi would be your best option - both are low powered and can easily be hidden (about the size of a debit card).