The short answer to this question is Yes, Sony Bravia reads Exfat without any problem. That is, our kdl46ex720 does that, and as far as we know, all new models of Sony are able to do the same.
Recently we purchased this Sony Bravia KDL kdl- 46 inch ex720 model. It is a great LED television, with superior image and excellent characteristics. It is needless to say that we are very please with it. However, when connecting our external hard drive to it, initially it was not recognized. Soon we found out why – our external disk (Silicon Power Armor a70) was formatted NTFS- and Sony bravia (apparently at the moment) does not support the NTFS file system.
Fat-32 works very well – we were able to test that very easily, by plugging in another fat-32 USB drive. However fat32 file system has one inherent deficiency – you cannot store a file larger than 4 Gb on fat32. Given that a lot of high definition movies are larger than 4 Gb, it is obviously not the file system of choice here.
So we turned our attention to Exfat. Exfat should be very similar to fat32, except it enables storing files larger than 4Gb. We had to update our Windows XP operating system and with the update there came the support for Exfat as well. Windows 7 should have the exfat abilities already built in. Finally, after the Exfat formatting of our USB external hard drive, everything worked great, and our Sony LED TV was able to read all the supported movies formats stored on the Exfat file system without any problem.
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Yes, I did the same thing but in my case, I didn’t format the whole hard drive; instead, I partitioned it into four drives and formatted the rest of the drives with exFat file system. So now I have four partitions with one formatted with NTFS and three with exFat file systems. I still can’t play video or anything in my SONY Bravia KDL EX621 LED TV. I don’t know why? If formatting the whole hard drive seems the only solution though, I will have to lose a 254GB data which is already in the disk, which obviously is something I really don’t want to do. Backup? I don’t have anything to back up it on. What am I supposed to do now? Please help!!
Hi Gohome,
I have never tried to connect a partitioned hard drive, so I cannot really tell where the problem might be. Sony seems to be pretty picky when it comes to the file formats it supports, so it may be that the partitioned drives are also not recognized. Sorry I cannot be of more help.
Hi All,
I have a KLD-40EX720 produced November 2011.
I tried to play movies from one external HDD – Western Digital Passport – 300GB. Formated FAT32 works fine, formated exFAT – does not recognize it. The TV give an error “USB device is not properly formated” – or something like that.
How did it work exFAT on your KDL-46EX720 ? Are you sure it was exFAT, or was it FAT32 ?
Hi Sorin,
Yes, it was exFAT and it worked without any problem. Can you see the content on your USB when it is connected to a PC?
Thank you for answering.
Yes, when connected to any PC I can read/write on the HDD formatted exFAT. I contacted Sony support and they say that it works only with FAT32 although in the technical file says it could support also exFAT. And also I came across your blog. So…I am puzzled..
Very strange what Sony support says, indeed. Here is the list of supported file formats from their website. Near the end of that web page, the first note says:
USB supported file systems are FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, and exFAT. Files larger than 4GB are only supported when using the exFAT file system.
In addition, I can assure you that exFAT works with my model, that is, Sony BRAVIA KDL46EX720 3D Led 46-Inch TV.