I have a video saved on my laptop, and I transferred it to an external memory card to watch it on my TV. However, when I try to play it, I get a message saying, 'The file is not supported.' What can I do to resolve this issue?
4 Answers
It could help to check your TV's manual to confirm what video formats it supports. I'd be surprised if it doesn’t handle .mp4 files since most TVs from recent years do. There may be other specific requirements that your TV has, so it's worth a look.
Check what video formats your TV supports! Once you know that, you can use a variety of video conversion tools available online to convert your file into an acceptable format. It's pretty straightforward and should help solve your issue.
If you're looking for a workaround, I personally keep a cheap laptop plugged into my TV's HDMI port permanently. I just run VLC on it to play whatever video files I need. It's super convenient!
Most TVs have pretty strict limitations on the video formats they can play. A good solution is to use a free software like Handbrake to convert your video to an H.264 format. Just load your video in Handbrake, select the 'Fast 1080p30 (Default)' preset under 'General,' and hit 'Start Encode.' For a quick test, you could set it to convert just a small segment of the video (like 30 seconds) first, just to see if it plays before doing the whole thing. Oh, and make sure the file extension is .mp4 because sometimes the format can be fine but the file extension might cause issues!
That's true! My TV only plays .mp4 files, but it won't touch .mov or .avi files, which is super frustrating since a lot of clips I have are in those formats.