With the availabilty of movies and TV shows to download, people desired to watch them on their Tvs. One option was to buy a Dvd player with Divx codecs and burn a DVD with .avi or convert the movie to mpeg or use some software like DVD santa to convert movies providing that you had the appropriate codecs installed to DVD format. Then you had to worry about wether your DVD played + or - discs. Another option is to install a Video card to interface with your Tv or use the S-video output on your laptop.
Now you can buy a Tv or Dvd player with a USB slot built in. But you have to make sure that it has the Divx codecs to play .avi 's since that format arguebly gives the best quality with the lowest compression ratio.
These USB slots are made to read thumb drives. So I reasoned that I could just connect a HD to it . It would not recognize the drive because it was formated to NTFS. It took a long time to find some freeware to convert my drive to Fat32. Everyone was recommending partion magic $69.00. You will have to move your stored data before reformating or you will lose it. This solution works for PS3 users too.

This links to the download page on Cnet. This software is a disk management utility.

http://www.download.com/Easeus-Partition-Manager/3000-2248_4-10863346.html?tag=mncol;txt">http://www.download.com/Easeus-Partition-Manager/3000-2248_4-10863346.html?tag=mncol;txt